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 the two-path relay scheme is exploited to deal with the increase in 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 the two-path relay scheme together in the 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 the sources and the relays ensures that symbols from different sources are allowed to be broadcasted in the same time slot. We also adopt physical-layer network coding (PNC) at the relay nodes to deal with the inter-relay interference caused by the two-path relay. With careful process design, our scheme can achieve the ideal throughput up to 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 complex additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh fading channels. The simulation results verify the improvements achieved by the proposed scheme.