Energy Efficiency of Network Coded Cooperative Communications in Nakagami-$m$ Fading

In this letter, we evaluate the energy efficiency of a wireless network-coded cooperative system where multiple nodes cooperatively transmit their information to a common destination. The energy consumption of the transmission and reception circuits is taken into account. It is shown that network coding can provide significant energy savings compared to direct transmission and traditional cooperation techniques. We consider a Nakagami- m fading model, so that the influence of a line-of-sight is also investigated. The optimal number of users that minimizes the energy consumption is obtained analytically, and confirmed by numerical results. Using this number to organize the nodes in clusters can provide considerable energy savings and decrease the network encoding/decoding complexity.