Network Coding Based on Product Codes in Cooperative Relaying

Employing network coding at the relay in cooperative relay system can improve the system throughput. However, XOR based network coding does not provide a strong error correction capability that can be used at the base station (receiver) in decoding the information of the cooperating users. Instead a block code can be used to combine the received user packets at the relay station where only the extra redundancy of the block code are forwarded by the relay station. With this structure a better error correction capability is embedded to the network coding scheme providing a better help to the receiver when decoding the user information. Combining this network coding structure with the individual block codes of the users, an overall product code can be obtained which gives the possibility of generating more powerful overall codes and increases the correction capability of the decoding process at the receiver. The obtained results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional XOR based network coding scheme and gives the possibility of combining more users in the cooperation process.