Distributed Serially Concatenated Codes for Multi-Source Cooperative Relay Networks

In this paper, we propose a distributed turbo-like coding scheme for a multi-source relay scenario where multiple sources communicate with a destination with the help of a common relay, which uses the decode-and-forward strategy and operates in half-duplex mode. The proposed distributed code can be viewed as a serially concatenated code (SCC). Thus, at the destination decoding is performed in an iterative fashion which resembles the decoding of a classic SCC. We consider the two scenarios where the sources transmit over orthogonal channels and where they do not. For the latter, interleave-division multiple-access is used for multiuser detection. For both scenarios we optimize the transmission time allocated to the sources and to the relay and compute the achievable rates. The proposed scheme achieves very low error rates and offers significant performance gains with respect to non-cooperation, even for a very large number of sources. Furthermore, it provides a high flexibility in terms of code rate, number of sources, overall system rate and error protection.