Cooperative Communication in Multi-Source Line Networks

Cooperative communication is shown to be an efficient method of combating fading in wireless networks. By "sharing" their antennas cooperating single-antenna nodes create a virtual multi-antenna system and therefore, benefit from spatial diversity. Network coding being a particular cooperative communication technique provides substantial gains in data rate, especially in networks with many sink nodes. By allowing intermediate nodes of a network to mix the incoming data streams, one can achieve the multicast capacity. Recently, Xiao and Skoglund showed that binary network coding (BNC) is not optimal for multi-user multi-relay networks in terms of diversity and proposed diversity network coding (DNC) scheme that outperforms BNC approach. Following this approach we examine potential diversity gains of using the DNC scheme for multi-source line networks. We show that the DNC technique outperforms both conventional time-orthogonal transmission and the BNC scheme. Further, the problem of optimal scheduling of the transmission is explored. We formulate the optimization problem and propose efficient solutions. Numerical results are presented to support theoretical findings.