XOR-Assisted Cooperative Diversity in OFDMA Wireless Networks: Optimization Framework and Approximation Algorithms

Network coding has been leveraged with cooperative diversity to improve performance in single channel wireless networks. However, it is not clear how network coding based cooperative diversity can be exploited effectively in multi-channel networks where overhearing is not readily available. Moreover, the question of how to practically realize the promising gains available, including multi-user diversity, cooperative diversity and network coding in multi-channel networks, also remains unexplored. This work represents the first attempt to unravel these two questions. In this paper, we propose XOR-CD, a novel XOR-assisted cooperative diversity scheme in OFDMA wireless networks. It can greatly improve the relay efficiency by over 100% mostly, thus uplifting the throughput performance by over 30% compared to conventional cooperative diversity scheme. In addition, we formulate a unifying optimization framework that jointly considers relay assignment, relay strategy selection, channel assignment and power allocation to reap different forms of gains. We design efficient polynomial time algorithms to solve the NP-hard problem with provably the best approximation factor, and verify their effectiveness using realistic simulations.