Network Coding for Cooperative Communications

In this paper, we propose network coding, as an efficient and low cost option for the implementation of blockMarkov coding for cooperative communications. Cooperative communications is a strategy where users, besides transmitting their own encoded information, also relay re-encoded versions of other users’ information to a common destination. Our work is motivated by the recent information-theoretic results on user cooperation. These results show that cooperating users in a multiple access channel can improve on the classical multiple access channel capacity region under the same average transmit power constraint. Additionally, cooperation provides diversity gain. The proposed implementation of the above information theoretic coding with network coding is very simple and cost effective.