Embodiments are provided for a compress and forward relaying scheme in joint multi-cell processing. A plurality of base stations receive similar combinations of user signals from a plurality of users, compress the signals using quantization, and relay the signals over respective backhaul links to a processor in the network for decoding the signal. The processor determines suitable quantization noise levels for the backhaul links according to a weighted sum-rate maximization function for optimizing the quantization noise levels, subject to a backhaul sum capacity constraint on the backhaul links. The determined quantization noise levels are sent to the base stations, which then quantize the received combinations of user signals according to the quantization noise levels and relay the quantized signals to the processor. The quantization is according to a Wyner-Ziv coding or a single user compression algorithm that excludes statistical correlations between the user signals at the base stations.