Myopic Coding in Multiple Relay Channels

TL;DR

This paper explores myopic coding in multi-relay networks, showing it achieves near-omniscient rates at low power and offers practical robustness and reduced complexity compared to global coding strategies.

Contribution

It introduces and analyzes myopic coding in multiple relay channels, demonstrating its effectiveness and advantages over omniscient coding in terms of rate and practicality.

Findings

Myopic coding achieves rates close to omniscient coding at low power in multi-relay channels.

Myopic coding is more robust to network topology changes.

It reduces computational complexity and memory requirements.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate achievable rates for data transmission from sources to sinks through multiple relay networks. We consider myopic coding, a constrained communication strategy in which each node has only a local view of the network, meaning that nodes can only transmit to and decode from neighboring nodes. We compare this with omniscient coding, in which every node has a global view of the network and all nodes can cooperate. Using Gaussian channels as examples, we find that when the nodes transmit at low power, the rates achievable with two-hop myopic coding are as large as that under omniscient coding in a five-node multiple relay channel and close to that under omniscient coding in a six-node multiple relay channel. These results suggest that we may do local coding and cooperation without compromising much on the transmission rate. Practically, myopic coding schemes are more robust to topology changes because encoding and decoding at a node are not affected when there are changes at remote nodes. Furthermore, myopic coding mitigates the high computational complexity and large buffer/memory requirements of omniscient coding.