Soft forwarding for cooperative wireless communication

Providing for soft error decoding for wireless relay networks is described herein. By way of example, a wireless node in a wireless relay network can receive a direct signal from a source node, and can receive a forwarded version of the source signal from a relay node. An information flag included with the forwarded version is referenced to determine whether the relay node property received the source signal. If the relay node received the source signal with error, and a destination node received the source signal with error, soft decision information can be generated from the forwarded version of the source signal and employed to assist with decoding of the source signal at the destination node. The soft-decision information improves end-to-end performance of the wireless relay system, while mitigating complexity and bandwidth requirements for the relay node as compared with conventional signal decoding techniques.