On the transmission of correlated sources over relay channels

In this paper, we consider the reliable transmission of correlated sources over the relay channel. The destination wishes to find a lossless reconstruction of both sources. We find the sufficient conditions under which the relay can partially cooperate with the sender to transmit the sources to the destination. The achievability scheme is based on regular encoding/backward decoding strategy. The proposed region includes the known region for multiple-access channel with correlated sources and the achievable rate of relay channel with partial decode-and-forward strategy, as special cases. A class of deterministic relay channels is considered. It is shown that the error-free transmission of correlated sources is possible over this channel, using the proposed joint source-channel coding scheme.