Distributed coding for cooperative wireless networks: An overview and recent advances

Cooperative communication has been shown to be an effective technique enabling single-antenna users to share their antennas to create a virtual MIMO system, thus providing extra spatial diversity in wireless networks. Distributed coding is a type of channel coding strategy developed for cooperative wireless networks. As opposed to conventional channel coding schemes, distributed coding constructs the whole codeword in a distributed manner among the cooperative users. Properly designed distributed coding can effectively approach the capacity of cooperative wireless networks. The aim of this article is to present an overview of recent development in distributed coding design in cooperative wireless networks.