Exchange-and-Forward Protocol for Half-Duplex Transmitter Cooperation

In a transmitter-cooperative network, the source nodes help each other and jointly encode their data, so as to maximize their mutual benefits. In this paper, we focus on a half-duplex four-node network, and study the feasible achievable rates. A transmission scheme, called exchange-and-forward, is proposed. In this scheme, the messages from the two source nodes are first exchanged, and then jointly encoded by using some coding techniques for MISO broadcast channel. The achievable rate region is compared with some existing schemes in literature.