Capacity and outage probability analysis of network coding based user cooperation transmission

The two user cooperative transmission context coincides with symmetric feature of network coding (NC), which makes it possible to perform distributed random coding, thus exploring both the cooperative diversity and the network coding diversity. In this paper, we provide performance analysis of network coding based two-user cooperation under an OFDMA based orthogonal physical layer channel, in terms of the channel capacity and outage probability. Expressions for exact capacity are devised and closed form of outage probability with lower bound is presented. Compared with the conventional user cooperation transmission, the NC_based two-user cooperation brings 11.8% higher capacity and 50% lower outage probability.