Network Coded Cooperative BICM-OFDM

In this paper, we study a cooperative diversity scheme for wireless systems employing network coding and the combination of bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). The considered system comprises multiple sources, one relay, and one destination. The relay decodes the signal received from all sources and performs network coding before forwarding the signal to the destination. We propose a simple cooperative maximum-ratio combining scheme for decoding at the destination which can successfully exploit the full spatial and frequency diversity offered by the channel for arbitrary number of sources and arbitrary modulation schemes. We derive a closed-form upper bound for the asymptotic worst-case pairwise error probability and the diversity gain of the considered network coded cooperative BICM-OFDM scheme. Simulation results corroborate the derived diversity gain and show the effectiveness of a low complexity decoding scheme.