  We study a multihop "virtual" full-duplex relay channel as a special case of
a general multiple multicast relay network. For such channel,
quantize-map-and-forward (QMF) (or noisy network coding (NNC)) achieves the
cut-set upper bound within a constant gap where the gap grows {\em linearly}
with the number of relay stages $K$. However, this gap may not be negligible
for the systems with multihop transmissions (i.e., a wireless backhaul
operating at higher frequencies). We have recently attained an improved result
to the capacity scaling where the gap grows {\em logarithmically} as $\log{K}$,
by using an optimal quantization at relays and by exploiting relays' messages
(decoded in the previous time slot) as side-information. In this paper, we
further improve the performance of this network by presenting a mixed scheme
where each relay can perform either decode-and-forward (DF) or QMF with
possibly rate-splitting. We derive the achievable rate and show that the
proposed scheme outperforms the QMF-optimized scheme. Furthermore, we
demonstrate that this performance improvement increases with $K$.
