Energy Efficient Cooperation in Wireless Networks Based on Network Coding

In this paper, we study a mobile cooperative scheme by taking advantage of network coding to enhance the throughput and energy efficiency for mobile terminals. The mobile terminals are clustered into cooperation groups in each of which one of the mobile terminals acts as the group head to coordinate the cooperative signals transmitted among mobile terminals. The objective function of the cooperative scheme targets to seek the minimal energy consumption of mobile terminals under the assumption that a certain constraint on the bit error rate is met. The numerical simulation results indicate that the network coding scheme is advantageous compared to the reference direct transmit scheme where all the mobile terminals transmit signals to the base station directly without cooperation. However, for the cooperation to be really beneficial the cooperation cluster should be formed such that the head of the group is not constrained by energy consumption.