Research Projects

Functional Forwarding of Channel State Information

Jiening Zhan and Michael Gastpar

National Science Foundation

In large relay networks, the assumption of global channel knowledge at the destination is optimistic in practice. The fading behavior is typically measured at the intermediate relays but not directly known at the destination. Traditionally, full channel state information is forwarded to the destination at the expense of the system. We observe that it is may be sufficient for the destination to know only a function of the various channel states. We develop a general framework for forwarding a function of the channel state information in relay systems with local channel knowledge. We apply our framework to several networks and find that functional forwarding of channel state information is much more efficiently than full forwarding.