Network-coded cooperation protocol for multiple source - Multiple relay topologies in cellular networks

This paper proposes a network coded cooperation protocol for the uplink transmission of relay enhanced cellular networks, which is intended to multiple source-multiple relay cooperative clusters. Two variants of the network coded protocol are proposed, one employing XOR-based erasure codes, which operates on the cluster cooperation graph, and one employing Reed Solomon codes. The two protocol variants were analyzed in terms of outage behaviour of the network decoder. Their performances were also evaluated in terms of the block error rate ensured.