Coding for the Z Channel With a Digital Relay Link

This paper considers a discrete memoryless four-node network where two nodes want to send three independent messages to the other two nodes. The two receiving nodes are allowed to cooperate by means of a unidirectional noiseless link with finite capacity. A coding scheme is proposed which combines rate splitting, block Markov multi-level superposition coding with binning and joint decoding. The general achievable rates are then specialized to degraded channel and Gaussian channel, where it is shown that the sum capacity for the Gaussian channel is achieved under certain conditions. Results in this paper recover and unify previously known results for the discrete memoryless Z channel without cooperation, and results for the Gaussian Z-interference channel with a digital relay link.