An Improvement of Cover/El Gamal's Compress-and-Forward Relay Scheme

The compress-and-forward relay scheme developed by (Cover and El Gamal, 1979) is improved with a modification on the decoding process. The improvement follows as a result of realizing that it is not necessary for the destination to decode the compressed observation of the relay; and even if the compressed observation is to be decoded, it can be more easily done by joint decoding with the original message, rather than in a successive way. An extension to multiple relays is also discussed.