Network-Coding-Based Coded Cooperation

Coded cooperation is a promising user cooperation scheme. In this paper, we first propose a novel network-coding-based coded cooperation scheme. When a user decodes its partner's information correctly in the first frame, it transmits the combination of the partner's parity bits and its own parity bits through network coding in the second frame. This is distinct from the classical scheme, where the user only transmits the partner's parity bits during cooperation. We analyze the outage probability of the proposed scheme, and show that it achieves a full diversity order. Numerical evaluations reveal that the proposed scheme outperforms the classical scheme when the inter-user channel is poor, yet is worse when the inter-user channel is strong. Also, the results show that the proposed scheme always outperforms that of no cooperation in various channel conditions while the performance of classical scheme is worse than that of no cooperation with the poor inter-user channels. This means that the performance of the proposed scheme is more stable than the classical scheme and the proposed scheme is more tolerant to the poor inter-user channels. To combine the advantages of the proposed scheme and the classical scheme under different inter-user channel conditions, we propose an adaptive solution. This adaptive scheme enhances the system performance considerably in all channel conditions in spite of the inter-user channel quality, at the expense of only one acknowledgement or non-acknowledgement bit.