This paper emphasizes the importance of relays channels that possess correlated information at the transmitter and the relay as basic building blocks for sensor networks. This work characterizes achievable rates, and in some cases, the capacity of these channels. This characterization is obtained for two distinct scenarios. The first scenario involves the transmission of a single source to the receiver using the relay as an intermediate node. The second involves communicating two sources of information simultaneously (available at the transmitter and at the relay respectively) to the receiver. In this paper, explicit conditions are found under which the transmitter and relay can achieve full data cooperation, as if they were co-located and acted as a multiple antenna transmitter. Finally, the MIMO Gaussian relay channel is used as an illustrative example to show that the set of relay channels with correlated information in which full data cooperation is possible, and thus capacity can be characterized, is non-trivial and is a fairly realistic set.
展开▼
