Optimal grouping and matching for network-coded cooperative communications

Network-coded cooperative communications (NC-CC) is a new advance in wireless networking that exploits network coding (NC) to improve the performance of cooperative communications (CC). However, there remains very limited understanding of this new hybrid technology, particularly at the link layer and above. This paper fills in this gap by studying a network optimization problem that requires joint optimization of session grouping, relay node grouping, and matching of session/relay groups. After showing that this problem is NP-hard, we present a polynomial time heuristic algorithm to this problem. Using simulation results, we show that our algorithm is highly competitive and can produce near-optimal results.