Short-Message Noisy Network Coding with Partial Source Cooperation

Abstract—Noisy network coding (NNC) has been shown to outperform standard compress-and-forward (CF) in networks with multiple relays and/or multiple destinations. Recently, short-message noisy network coding (SNNC) has been proved to achieve the same rate region as NNC for independent sources but with significantly reduced encoding delay and decoding complexity. In this paper, we show that when partial cooperation between source nodes is possible, by performing rate-splitting, message exchange, and superposition coding with proper power allocation at the source nodes, SNNC can achieve a strictly larger rate region than NNC. The gain comes from coherent combining at all the receiving nodes. I