Multi-source relay networks exploiting cooperative network coding

In this paper, we develop effective multi-source relay schemes which, by exploiting cooperative network coding, are designed to achieve a high diversity gain and coding efficiency. Key to the proposed schemes lies in two ingredients: (1) Utilization of the high-capacity channels between closely spaced intra-cluster nodes to enable efficient information exchange among these nodes; (2) Proper distributed network coding that provides high diversity gain. Outage probability analysis and numerical results are provided and evidently demonstrate higher diversity gain and coding efficiency that the proposed schemes achieve compared to other comparable network coding schemes.