High-Throughput Cooperative Communication with Interference Cancellation for Two-Path Relay in Multi-source System

Relay-based cooperative communication has become a research focus in recent years because it can achieve diversity gain in wireless networks. In existing works, network coding and two-path relay are adopted to deal with the increase of network size and the half-duplex nature of relay, respectively. To further improve bandwidth efficiency, we propose a novel cooperative transmission scheme which combines network coding and two-path relay together in a multi-source system. Due to the utilization of two-path relay, our proposed scheme achieves full-rate transmission. Adopting complex field network coding (CFNC) at both sources and relays ensures that symbols from different sources are allowed to be broadcast in the same time slot. We also adopt physical-layer network coding (PNC) at relay nodes to deal with the inter-relay interference caused by the two-path relay. With careful process design, the ideal throughput of our scheme achieves by 1 symbol per source per time slot (sym/S/TS). Furthermore, the theoretical analysis provides a method to estimate the symbol error probability (SEP) and throughput in additive complex white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh fading channels. The simulation results verify the improvement achieved by the proposed scheme.