On the energy efficiency of feedback-assisted network coding in multiuser cooperative systems

In this paper, we consider the energy efficiency as a metric to evaluate the performance of the network coding technique when applied to a feedback-assisted multiple access cooperative network, where multiple nodes have independent information to transmit to a common destination. The energy consumption of the transmission and reception circuits is taken into account, and it is shown that only one bit of feedback may reduce the network consumption when compared schemes without feedback. The optimal number of nodes that minimizes the energy consumption of the network as a function of the distance is obtained analytically, and confirmed by numerical results.