The degrees of freedom of compute-and-forward

Urs Niesen*, Phil Whiting

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference proceeding contributionpeer-review

11 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We analyze the asymptotic behavior of compute-and-forward relay networks in the regime of high signal-to-noise ratios. We consider a section of such a network consisting of K transmitters and K relays. The aim of the relays is to reliably decode an invertible function of the messages sent by the transmitters. An upper bound on the capacity of this system can be obtained by allowing full cooperation among the transmitters and among the relays, transforming the network into a K × K multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel. The number of degrees of freedom of compute-and-forward is hence at most K. In this paper, we analyze the degrees of freedom achieved by the lattice coding implementation of compute-and-forward proposed recently by Nazer and Gastpar. We show that this lattice implementation achieves at most 2=(1+1=K) ≤ 2 degrees of freedom, thus exhibiting a very different asymptotic behavior than the MIMO upper bound. This raises the question if this gap of the lattice implementation to the MIMO upper bound is inherent to compute-and-forward in general. We answer this question to the negative by proposing a novel compute-and-forward implementation achieving K degrees of freedom.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2011 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory Proceedings, ISIT 2011
Place of PublicationPiscataway, NJ
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Pages1081-1085
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9781457705953
ISBN (Print)9781457705960, 9781457705946
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2011
Externally publishedYes
Event2011 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory Proceedings, ISIT 2011 - St. Petersburg, Russian Federation
Duration: 31 Jul 20115 Aug 2011

Other

Other2011 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory Proceedings, ISIT 2011
Country/TerritoryRussian Federation
CitySt. Petersburg
Period31/07/115/08/11

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