High-Throughput Multi-Source Cooperation via Complex-Field Network Coding

Physical-layer network coding over wireless networks can provide considerable throughput gains with respect to traditional cooperative relaying strategies at no loss of diversity gain. In this paper, a novel cooperation protocol is developed based on complex-field wireless network coding. Sources transmit efficiently information symbols linearly combined with symbols from other sources. Different from existing wireless network coding protocols, transmissions are not restricted to binary symbols, and do not have to be received simultaneously. In a network with N sources, the developed protocol can achieve throughput up to approximately 1/N symbols per source per channel use, as well as diversity of order N. To deal with decoding errors at sources, selective- and adaptive-forwarding protocols are also developed at no loss of diversity gain. Analytical results corroborated by simulated tests show considerable performance gains with respect to distributed space-time coding, and bit-level network coding protocols.