text: The compute-and-forward framework permits each receiver in a Gaussian network to directly decode a linear combination of the transmitted messages. The resulting linear combinations can then be employed as an end-to-end communication strategy for relaying, interference alignment, and other applications. Recent efforts have demonstrated the advantages of employing unequal powers at the transmitters and decoding more than one linear combination at each receiver. However, neither of these techniques fit naturally within the original formulation of compute-and-forward. This paper proposes an expanded compute-and-forward framework that incorporates both of these possibilities and permits an intuitive interpretation in terms of signal levels. Within this framework, recent achievability and optimality results are unified and generalized.
  @cite_62: We consider the 2 2 2 multiple-input multipleoutput interference channel where two source-destination pairs wish to communicate with the aid of two intermediate relays. In this paper, we propose a novel lattice strategy called Aligned Precoded Compute-and-Forward (PCoF). This scheme consists of two phases: 1) Using the CoF framework based on signal alignment we transform the Gaussian network into a deterministic finite field network. 2) Using linear precoding (over finite field) we eliminate the end-to-end interference in the finite field domain. Further, we exploit the algebraic structure of lattices to enhance the performance at finite SNR, such that beyond a degree of freedom result (also achievable by other means). We can also show that Aligned PCoF outperforms time sharing in a range of reasonably moderate SNR, with increasing gain as SNR increases.
  @cite_9: We consider a two-hop relay model in which multiple sources communicate with a single destination via multiple distributed relays. We propose an asymmetric Compute-and-Forward (CoF) scheme that allows lattice coding with different coarse and fine lattices at the sources. The proposed scheme is motivated by the observation that, in an asymmetric CoF system, a higher transmission power at a source does not necessarily translate to a higher achievable information rate. We show that significant performance enhancement can be achieved by optimizing the transmission powers of the sources below their respective budgets. Further, the asymmetric construction of lattice coding allows the relays to conduct different modulo operations to reduce their forwarding rates, thereby supporting higher rates at the sources. However, modulo operations in general incur information loss, and so need to be carefully designed to ensure that the destination can successfully recover the source messages. As such, we propose a novel successive recovering algorithm for decoding at the destination, and establish sufficient conditions to guarantee successful recovery. Numerical results are provided to verify the superiority of our proposed scheme over other schemes.
  @cite_85: We present a framework to study linear deterministic interference networks over finite fields. Unlike the popular linear deterministic models introduced to study Gaussian networks, we consider networks where the channel coefficients are general scalars over some extension field Fpm (scalar m-th extensionfield models), m×m diagonal matrices over Fp (m-symbol extension ground-field models), and m×m general non-singular matrices (MIMO ground field models). We use the companion matrix representation of the extension field to convert m-th extension scalar models into MIMO ground-field models where the channel matrices have special algebraic structure. For such models, we consider the 2× 2× 2 topology (two-hops two-flow) and the 3-user interference network topology. We derive achievability results and feasibility conditions for certain schemes based on the Precoding-Based Network Alignment (PBNA) approach, where intermediate nodes use random linear network coding (i.e., propagate random linear combinations of their incoming messages) and non-trivial precoding decoding is performed only at the network edges, at the sources and destinations. Furthermore, we apply this approach to the scalar 2×2×2 complex Gaussian IC with fixed channel coefficients, and show two competitive schemes outperforming other known approaches at any SNR, where we combine finite-field linear precoding decoding with lattice coding and the Compute and Forward approach at the signal level. As a side result, we also show significant advantages of vector linear network coding both in terms of feasibility probability (with random coding coefficients) and in terms of coding latency, with respect to standard scalar linear network coding, in PBNA schemes.
  @cite_42: We consider virtual full-duplex relaying by means of half-duplex relays. In this configuration, each relay stage in a multihop relaying network is formed by at least two relays, used alternatively in transmit and receive modes, such that while one relay transmits its signal to the next stage, the other relay receives a signal from the previous stage. With such a pipelined scheme, the source is active and sends a new information message in each time slot. We consider the achievable rates for various coding schemes and compare them with a cut-set upper bound, which is tight in certain conditions. We show that both lattice-based compute-and-forward (CoF) and quantize-map-and-forward (QMF) yield attractive performance and implementation. In particular, QMF in this context does not require long messages and joint (non-unique) decoding, if the quantization mean-square distortion at the relays is chosen appropriately. In addition, in the multihop case the gap of QMF from the cut-set upper bound grows logarithmically with the number of stages, and not linearly as in the case of noise level quantization. Furthermore, we show that CoF is particularly attractive in the case of multihop relaying, when the channel gains have fluctuations not larger than 3 dB, yielding a rate that does not depend on the number of relaying stages. In particular, we argue that such architecture may be useful for a wireless backhaul with line-of-sight propagation between the relays.
  @cite_76: We show that fully connected two-hop wireless networks with K sources, K relays, and K destinations have K degrees of freedom both in the case of time-varying channel coefficients and constant channel coefficients (in which case the result holds for almost all values of constant channel coefficients). Our main contribution is a new achievability scheme which we call Aligned Network Diagonalization. This scheme allows the data streams transmitted by the sources to undergo a diagonal linear transformation from the sources to the destinations, thus being received free of interference by their intended destination. In addition, we extend our scheme to multihop networks with fully connected hops, and multihop networks with MIMO nodes, for which the degrees of freedom are also fully characterized.
  @cite_73: 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 in the negative by proposing a novel compute-and-forward implementation achieving K degrees of freedom.
  @cite_25: Consider several source nodes communicating across a wireless network to a destination node with the help of several layers of relay nodes. Recent work by Avestimehr has approximated the capacity of this network up to an additive gap. The communication scheme achieving this capacity approximation is based on compress-and-forward, resulting in noise accumulation as the messages traverse the network. As a consequence, the approximation gap increases linearly with the network depth. This paper develops a computation alignment strategy that can approach the capacity of a class of layered, time-varying wireless relay networks up to an approximation gap that is independent of the network depth. This strategy is based on the compute-and-forward framework, which enables relays to decode deterministic functions of the transmitted messages. Alone, compute-and-forward is insufficient to approach the capacity as it incurs a penalty for approximating the wireless channel with complex-valued coefficients by a channel with integer coefficients. Here, this penalty is circumvented by carefully matching channel realizations across time slots to create integer-valued effective channels that are well suited to compute-and-forward. Unlike prior constant gap results, the approximation gap obtained in this paper also depends closely on the fading statistics, which are assumed to be i.i.d. Rayleigh.
summary: The original motivation for the compute-and-forward strategy was the possibility of relaying in a multi-hop network while avoiding the harmful effects of interference between users (by decoding linear combinations) as well as noise accumulation (by decoding at every relay). Several works have investigated and improved upon the performance of the original compute-and-forward framework in the context of multi-hop relaying @cite_73 @cite_25 @cite_85 @cite_42 @cite_62 @cite_76 . Our expanded framework can improve performance further by permitting relays to employ unequal powers and decode multiple linear combinations when appropriate. Following the conference publication of this work, Tan al @cite_9 noted that our proposed message representation may be inefficient for multi-hop relaying if each relay naively treats a linear combination over @math as @math information symbols for the next hop. They proposed a lattice-based solution to this issue. It is also possible to resolve this issue directly over the message representation by having each relay only use some of its @math received symbols as information symbols for the next hop. See [Section III.F] ncncarxiv for details.