  Consider several source nodes communicating across a wireless network to a
destination node with the help of several layers of relay nodes. Recent work by
Avestimehr et al. has approximated the capacity of this network up to an
additive gap. The communication scheme achieving this capacity approximation is
based on compress-and-forward, resulting in noise accumulation as the messages
traverse the network. As a consequence, the approximation gap increases
linearly with the network depth.
  This paper develops a computation alignment strategy that can approach the
capacity of a class of layered, time-varying wireless relay networks up to an
approximation gap that is independent of the network depth. This strategy is
based on the compute-and-forward framework, which enables relays to decode
deterministic functions of the transmitted messages. Alone, compute-and-forward
is insufficient to approach the capacity as it incurs a penalty for
approximating the wireless channel with complex-valued coefficients by a
channel with integer coefficients. Here, this penalty is circumvented by
carefully matching channel realizations across time slots to create
integer-valued effective channels that are well-suited to compute-and-forward.
Unlike prior constant gap results, the approximation gap obtained in this paper
also depends closely on the fading statistics, which are assumed to be i.i.d.
Rayleigh.
