Outage analysis of Joint Channel-Network Coding and its dependence on the interleaver pattern

This paper presents the outage probability analysis of Joint Channel and Network Coding (JCNC) scheme in Multiple Access Relay Channel (MARC). In particular, the effect of using different interleaver patterns at different users is analysed. The motivation of this work is to show that despite its capability of achieving up to 2 dB gain in Packet Error Rate (PER), the corresponding outage probability improvement is only minimal (upper bounded at approximately 0.6 dB). This signifies that the improvement achieved by using different interleaver patterns is largely attributed by the ability of iteratively decodable codes to perform closer to the capacity limit compared to the conventional convolutional code with Soft Input Soft Output (SISO) decoder.