SNCC: A Selective Network-Coded Cooperation Scheme in Wireless Networks

Network-coded cooperation is a new communication paradigm that exploits spatial diversity by pooling distributed "communication" (relay) and also the distributed "computation" resources (coding) of different nodes in a network so as to increase wireless networks system performance. In this paper, we develop a selective network-coded cooperation (SNCC) scheme suitable for multiple unicast transmission pairs in a single-cell wireless network. The relay node performs network coding on received information from multiple sources before forwarding the network-coded data towards the corresponding destinations, which can decode their desired data from the network-coded data and the data they overhear from the other sources. The performance analysis and evaluation in terms of the single-pair outage probability and diversity-multiplexing tradeoff show that under SNCC any transmission pair achieves a full diversity order of M+1 (M is the number of available relays) while holding a better diversity-multiplexing tradeoff performance than existing cooperative cooperation schemes. Moreover, due to the mechanism that the relay adapts the data on which to perform network coding according to the observed source-to-relay channel quality, SNCC smartly avoids error propagation due to incorporating erroneous data into network-coded data, which is verified by numerical results of the single-pair outage probability.