Slepian-Wolf Cooperation: A Practical and Efficient Compress-and-Forward Relay Scheme

The Slepian-Wolf (SW) cooperation proposed in [1] is probably the first practical cooperative scheme that implements the idea of compress-and-forward. Through the exploitation of efficient distributed source coding (DSC) technology, the authors of [1] demonstrate the effectiveness of Slepian-Wolf cooperation in combating inter-user channel outage in wireless environment. In this paper, we discuss the general framework of Slepian-Wolf cooperation using the two most popular DSC technologies: the binning/syndrome approach and the parity approach. We show that the latter is particularly useful in SW cooperation, since it is conceptually simpler, provides certain performance advantages, and enables any (system) linear channel code to be readily exploited. Examples using convolutional codes, low-density generator-matrix codes and low-density paritycheck codes are demonstrated and practical algorithms for estimating the source-relay correlation and for decoding the compound packets at the destination are discussed.