On the Combination of Cooperative Diversity and Network Coding for Wireless Uplink Transmissions

Cooperative diversity has been recognized as an effective and low-cost technique to combat multipath fading and enhance transmission reliability. Motivated by the fact that many existing cooperative protocols suffer some loss of ergodic capacity, network coding, which is a technique that is well known for its capability to increase system throughput, is proposed in this paper to be combined with cooperative diversity for uplink transmissions. Two kinds of information-theoretic metrics, i.e., outage and ergodic capacities, are developed for the proposed transmission scheme to assist with performance evaluation. The developed analytic results, which are shown to fit well with Monte Carlo simulation, demonstrate that the proposed protocol can achieve better system robustness and larger system throughput simultaneously than comparable schemes. The application of the proposed transmission protocol to scheduling is also studied to achieve better fairness-throughput tradeoff.