On Network Codes for Multiuser Cooperative Communication in a Line Network

In this paper, the use of network coding is exploited to improve the cooperative diversity order of multi-source multi-hop networks with line topology. We elaborate on a previous system model by allowing user nodes to be arbitrarily located along the line network, to have the ability to perform network decoding, and to be able to listen to upstream nodes. The recently introduced generalized dynamic-network codes (GDNC) are shown to be the best performing scheme under several distinct circumstances. Computer simulation results support the superiority of the GDNC scheme, and suggest that the connection between network coding and classical channel coding, initiated in a previous work, can once again be proved useful by reducing the design of network codes for arbitrarily located nodes to the design of classical block codes with unequal error/erasure protection.