Complex Field Network Coding for Wireless Cooperative Multicast Flows

Network coding is a promising technology designed to reach the min-cut max-flow capacity in wired network. While in wireless cooperative environments, it has been proved that network coding can also increase the system throughput by taking the advantage of the broadcast nature of electromagnetic waves. In this paper, we establish a 2-source and 2-destination cooperative systems with arbitrary number of relays (2-N-2 system), and then the designed signal-superposition-and-forward based complex field network coding protocol (SiSF-CFNC) is applied to the model. We define the system frame error probability (SFEP) to measure the performance of cooperative multicast systems with the proposed protocol. Power allocation schemes as well as precoder design are concentratively studied to improve the system performance without cutting down the system throughput.