Outage performance of two users cooperative network coding

Cooperative communications has emerged as an efficient realization of multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) systems. To reap the benefits of cooperative communications we follow the block-Markov code book structure. Recently a low cost and efficient operational implementation of block-Markov coding, using network coding, has been proposed. In this paper, we derive the closed form expression for outage probability of that network coded cooperative communications scheme. We take information theoretic approach to define the outage probability. For comparison purpose, we also discuss the outage results of space-time (ST) coded cooperation, and the cooperation based on repetition. With numerical results, we show that the network coded cooperation, based on block-Markov code book structure, performs better than ST and repetition based cooperation, in terms of coding gain, while offering the same diversity gain as the other two.