Performance analysis of wireless relay-based MIMO system using network coding

Recently, relay-based cooperative system has drawn much attention. There are several technical components to be considered in this relay system such as multiple antenna schemes, network coding, etc. In this paper, we do a performance analysis using a combination of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques and network coding in a wireless relay-based cooperative system having multiple nodes to send data toward one destination via one relay node which performs network coding. For the performance analysis, we derive overall error probability and channel capacity for multi-user uplink relay-based cooperative communication. The results show that the changes among MIMO modes (i.e., spatial multiplexing or diversity mode) at the transmission between source-to-relay or relay-to-destination is useful to maximize system capacity. Also this analysis can decide an optimal switching point of SNR for different MIMO modes in terms of average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in order to achieve best performance. Thus, a practical guidance of combined scheme using network coding and MIMO can be derived.