Cooperative Network Coding Strategies for Wireless Relay Networks with Backhaul

We investigate cooperative network coding strategies for relay-aided two-source two-destination wireless networks with a backhaul connection between the source nodes. Each source multicasts information to all destinations using a shared relay. We study cooperative strategies based on different network coding schemes, namely, finite field and linear network coding, and lattice coding. To further exploit the backhaul connection, we also propose network coding based beamforming. We measure the performance in term of achievable rates over Gaussian channels, and observe significant gains over benchmark schemes. We derive the achievable rate regions for these schemes and find the cut-set bound for our system. We also show that the cut-set bound can be achieved by network coding based beamforming when the signal-to-noise ratios lie in the sphere defined by the source-relay and relay-destination channel gains.