Polar Codes for Cooperative Relaying

We consider the symmetric discrete memoryless relay channel with orthogonal receiver components and show that polar codes are suitable for decode-and-forward and compress-and-forward relaying. In the first case we prove that polar codes are capacity achieving for the physically degraded relay channel; for stochastically degraded relay channels our construction provides an achievable rate. In the second case we construct sequences of polar codes that achieve the compress-and-forward rate by nesting polar codes for source compression into polar codes for channel coding. In both cases our constructions inherit most of the properties of polar codes. In particular, the encoding and decoding algorithms and the bound on the block error probability O(2 (N beta)) which holds for any 0 < beta < 1/2.