Short Message Noisy Network Coding With Sliding-Window Decoding for Half-Duplex Multihop Relay Networks

In this paper, we present a cooperative relaying strategy for half-duplex multihop relay networks. This scheme consists of three parts: 1) relay selection to yield a layered relay network; 2) group successive relaying that establishes a relay schedule to efficiently exploit half-duplex relays; and 3) a cooperative relaying scheme named short message noisy network coding with sliding-window decoding (SNNC-SW) that outperforms other state-of-the-art information theoretical schemes with lower decoding complexity and delay. We derive an achievable rate region of the proposed SNNC-SW scheme and attain a closed-form rate expression in the asymptotic case for several network models of interests. We then focus on the first part of our relaying strategy regarding efficient relay selection. We develop interference-harnessing routing that exploits the fact that in SNNC-SW, interference is treated as a useful signal. We show that, due to the efficient treatment of interference, this scheme can outperform routing schemes that deploy store-and-forward, a solution previously proposed for practical wireless multihop networks. Finally, we develop a low-complexity successive decoder of our scheme (implemented by a conventional MIMO decoder), which is a solution that can readily be implemented in practice. It is shown that also this practical scheme provides a significant gain over routing (based on store-and-forward) and the performance gap increases as the network becomes denser.