A New Coding Paradigm for the Primitive Relay Channel

We consider the primitive relay channel, where the source sends a message to the relay and to the destination, and the relay helps the communication by transmitting an additional message to the destination via a separate channel. Two well-known coding techniques have been introduced for this setting: decode-and-forward and compress-and-forward. In decode-and-forward, the relay completely decodes the message and sends some information to the destination; in compress-and-forward, the relay does not decode, and it sends a compressed version of the received signal to the destination using Wyner-Ziv coding. In this paper, we present a novel coding paradigm that provides an improved achievable rate for the primitive relay channel. The idea is to combine compress-and-forward and decode-and-forward via a chaining construction. We transmit over pairs of blocks: in the first block, we use compress-and-forward; and, in the second block, we use decode-and-forward. More specifically, in the first block, the relay does not decode, it compresses the received signal via Wyner-Ziv, and it sends only part of the compression to the destination. In the second block, the relay completely decodes the message, it sends some information to the destination, and it also sends the remaining part of the compression coming from the first block. By doing so, we are able to strictly outperform both compress-and-forward and decode-and-forward. Note that the proposed coding scheme can be implemented with polar codes. As such, it has the typical attractive properties of polar coding schemes, namely, quasi-linear encoding and decoding complexity, and error probability that decays at super-polynomial speed. As a running example, we take into account the special case of the erasure relay channel, and we provide a comparison between the rates achievable by our proposed scheme and the existing upper and lower bounds.

Seyed Hamed Hassani, Marco Mondelli, Rüdiger Urbanke

We present a coding paradigm that provides a new achievable rate for the primitive relay channel by combining compress-and-forward and decode-and-forward with a chaining construction. In the primitive relay channel model, the source broadcasts a message to the relay and to the destination; and the relay facilitates this communication by sending an additional message to the destination through a separate channel. Two well-known coding approaches for this setting are decode-and-forward and compress-and-forward: in the former, the relay decodes the message and sends some of the information to the destination; in the latter, the relay does not attempt to decode, but it sends a compressed description of the received sequence to the destination via Wyner-Ziv coding. In our scheme, we transmit over pairs of blocks and we use compress-and-forward for the first block and decode-and-forward for the second. In particular, in the first block, the relay does not attempt to decode and it sends only a part of the compressed description of the received sequence; in the second block, the relay decodes the message and sends this information plus the remaining part of the compressed sequence relative to the first block. As a result, we strictly outperform both compress-and-forward and decode-and-forward. Furthermore, this paradigm can be implemented with a low-complexity polar coding scheme that has the typical attractive features of polar codes, i.e., quasi-linear encoding/decoding complexity and super-polynomial decay of the error probability. Throughout the paper we consider as a running example the special case of the erasure relay channel and we compare the rates achievable by our proposed scheme with the existing upper and lower bounds.

IEEE2018

Delay and coding in multiple-user communications

Stéphane Musy

In multiple-user communications, the bursty nature of the packet arrival times cannot be divorced from the analysis of the transmission process. However, in traditional information theory the random arrival times are smoothed out by appropriated source coding and no consideration is made for the end-to-end delay. In this thesis, using tools from network theory, we investigate simple models that consider the end-to-end delay and/or the variability of the packet arrivals as important parameters, while staying in a information theoretic framework. First, we simplify the problem and focus on the transmission of a bursty source over a single-user channel. We introduce a new measure of channel features that enable us to incorporate the possibility to code among several packets in a scheduling problem. In this setup, we look for policies that minimize the average packet delay. Assuming that the packets are independent and sufficiently large to perform capacity achieving coding, we then consider the problem of allocating rates among a finite number of users communicating through a multiple-user channel. Following the previous work in the context of multiple-access channel, we formulate a scheduling problem in which the rate of each user is chosen from the capacity region of the multiple-user channel. Here, the goal is to find a scheduling policy that minimizes the sum of the transmitter queue lengths, such a policy is called delay optimal. In particular settings, for the additive Gaussian multiple-access channel we show the delay optimality of the Longer Queue Higher Rate policy introduced by Yeh. And, when the users communicate through a symmetric broadcast channel, we propose and show the delay optimality of a Best User Highest Possible Rate policy, among a large class of admissible policies. Finally, in the last part of this thesis, we look at the multiple-user channel coding problem from the perspective of the receivers. By measuring the transmission rates at the receivers, we are able to define variable length codes and to characterize the region of achievable rates when the receivers can decode their intended messages at different instants of time. For the two-user degraded broadcast channel and for the two-user multiple-access channel, we show that the gain in using variable length codes essentially comes from the possibility for the receivers to decode the transmitted messages in non-overlapping periods of time.

EPFL2007

On the capacity of erasure relay channel: Multi-relay case

Ramin Khalili

We consider here a single sender-destination multirelay channel. The links connecting the nodes are supposed to be erasure where symbols are received correctly without any error, or lost. We consider that the nodes are not able to use any interference cancellation mechanism. The interference might be suppressed through using separated physical channel or thought a time-sharing mechanism. This model is realistic for many practical scenarios in the context of wireless networks. In previous works, the capacity region of broadcast erasure channels as well as the capacity of the single-sender relay channel (under degraded and non-degraded hypothesis) has been derived. This paper extends the previous results to the more general case of multi-relay channels. We derive the cut-set bound for a general (stationary ergodic) multi-relay erasure channel, and we show that it can be reached through a practical linear coding scheme based on MDS codes.

2005

Delay and coding in multiple-user communications

Stéphane Musy

EPFL2007