Relaying via hybrid coding

Motivated by the recently developed hybrid coding scheme for joint source-channel coding, this paper proposes a new coding scheme for noisy relay networks. The proposed coding scheme operates in a similar manner to the noisy network coding scheme, except that each relay node uses the hybrid coding interface to transmit a symbol-by-symbol function of the received sequence and its quantized version. This coding scheme unifies both amplify-forward and noisy network coding and can strictly outperform both. The potential of the hybrid coding interface for relaying is demonstrated through the diamond relay network and two-way relay channel examples.