Cooperation protocol for the uplink of relay assisted cellular networks

The paper proposes a network coded cooperation protocol for the uplink transmission of relay assisted cellular networks characterized by non-ideal source - relay links. The proposed protocol employs Reed Solomon codes as network codes in order to improve the Block Error Rate (BLER) and Bit Error Rate (BER) performance over the slow varying fading channels. The paper presents also an algorithm for the computation of the BLER ensured by the cooperation protocol when the cooperative links are modeled as Block Erasure Channels (BLEC), as well as an analysis of the performance obtained, showing the significant improvement brought by the employment of RS network codes.