Network-Coded Cooperative Diversity in Multi-Hop Cellular Networks

The paper considers applying network-coded cooperation to enhance performance of conventional multi-hop cellular networks. For users located at coverage boundaries of base stations and relay stations, communication links are generally unreliable to provide guaranteed QoS satisfaction. In this paper we propose to perform network coding through relay stations for users located at boundaries, in order to provide additional diversity gains, and thus to reduce transmission bit error rates. The numerical results demonstrate that the proposed network-coded cooperation scheme can achieve substantial diversity gains over the conventional decode-and-forward cooperative transmission scheme, meanwhile benefiting from less radio resource consumption.