  The compress-and-forward relay scheme developed by (Cover and El Gamal, 1979)
is improved with a modification on the decoding process. The improvement
follows as a result of realizing that it is not necessary for the destination
to decode the compressed observation of the relay; and even if the compressed
observation is to be decoded, it can be more easily done by joint decoding with
the original message, rather than in a successive way. An extension to multiple
relays is also discussed.
