Multi-terminal source coding through a relay

Abstract

This paper studies a multi-terminal source coding problem, where two terminals possess two (correlated) Gaussian sources to be compressed and delivered to the destination through an intermediate relay. Unlike the CEO and conventional two-terminal source coding problems as well as point-to-point relay source coding problem, lattices are found to play an important role in achieving #x201C;good#x201D; rates for this problem setting. Two achievable strategies - compute-and-forward and compress-and-forward are used to develop achievable rates for this problem setting. For the symmetric case, the inner and outer bounds developed are shown to be within 1/2 bits of each other.