Communication Strategies and Coding for Relaying

Information-theoretic models for relaying are developed and applied to wireline and wireless networks. For wireline networks with node constraints, data compression is shown to improve rates. For wireless networks with half-duplex constraints, decode-and-forward strategies are developed that can give substantial rate gains over no-relay transmission and traditional multihopping. The performance of the strategies is verified by designing coded modulations that that approach certain information-theoretic limits. The codes used are irregular low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes.