Diversity Analysis of MIMO Network Coded Cooperation Systems with Relay Selection

Network coded cooperation (NCC) has recently gained interest due to its ability to increase the network throughput in multisource cooperative systems. NCC with single relay selection (SRS) or multiple relay selection (MRS) has been studied for single-antenna terminals only. Employing multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) can significantly improve the performance of NCC systems. In this paper, we consider a NCC system with decode-and-forward (DF) relaying where relays use maximum distance separable (MDS) codes as their encoding vectors. More specifically, we consider N sources, M relays and a single destination. Relays and the destination are equipped with multiple antennas whereas sources have single antenna. The performance of the system under consideration is investigated by deriving exact outage probability expressions for both SRS and MRS protocols. The asymptotical diversity orders are further provided to obtain valuable insights into practical system design. Furthermore, numerical results are provided to validate the accuracy of our derivations and quantify the effect of system parameters on the outage probability and diversity order.