An opportunistic network-coded cooperative uplink transmission scheme for wireless multi-relay networks

In this paper, a feedback-based opportunistic network-coded cooperative scheme is proposed to be combined with cooperative communication in wireless uplink multi-relay networks. Different from previous network-coded schemes that conduct network coding all the time, we propose a scheme that conducts network coding and direct transmission alternately according to the quality of the channels. The outage probability is analyzed theoretically and the approximate expression of outage probability is derived. Compared with the previous schemes, the proposed scheme achieves a performance gain in terms of outage probability. The validity of the proposed scheme is verified by theoretical analysis and simulation results.