An achievable rate for relay networks based on compress-and-forward strategy

Compress-and-Forward (CF) is a well-known coding strategy proposed for relay channels. Few works which were done about the generalization of the CF strategy to the relay networks, are based on irregular encoding/successive decoding. In this paper, a new generalization of the CF strategy to the relay networks based on regular encoding/backward decoding is presented. In general, backward decoding has been shown to yield higher rates in comparison with successive decoding. Here we will investigate the performance of backward decoding in our problem and show that our achievable rate includes the previously proposed rates.