Anti error propagation methods for wireless uplink using network coding

Wireless network coding suffers the error propagation issues that may severely degrade the diversity performance. In this work, we develop two power scaling schemes at the relay side and two detection schemes at the receiver side, respectively, to mitigate error propagation in network-coded uplink channel and thus achieve full diversity. For the soft power scaling based link adaptive relaying, we develop a virtual channel model and demonstrate that the relay power should be such to balance the signal-to-noise ratios of the source-relay channel and relay-destination channel. As for the hard power scaling based ON-OFF relaying, we first design a decision rule based on total pairwise error probability, and then simplifies it to the threshold-based relaying strategy. At the receiver side, we show that the weighted minimum distance detection with the weight being determined by the relative link quality of source-relay channel and relay-destination channel can achieve full diversity once the global channel state information is available, otherwise the maximum likelihood detection that explicitly takes into account relay decoding error should be employed to achieve full diversity.