Distributed coding based on partial relay selection

A new distributed coding scheme is proposed to achieve diversity in a network comprising multiple sources, multiple relays, and a single destination. This scheme is based on a distributed implementation of linear block codes, where each relay is assigned to a subset of the source nodes using the channel state information (CSI) of the source-relay (SR) channels. The proposed scheme achieves diversity without using the CSI of the relay-destination (R-D) channels for relay assignment. On the other hand, in classical distributed coding schemes, it is usually assumed that each relay can fully decide if its received symbols are successfully decoded. This is achieved by using complicated coding schemes in S-R channels, which is also vulnerable to quasi-static fading. The proposed scheme achieves the intended diversity without using this extra coding/overhead. For the resulting relay assignment problem, we propose an algorithm based on the max-min criterion.