Clustering based space-time network coding

Many-to-one communication is a challenging problem in practice due to channel fading and multi-user interferences. In this work, a new protocol that leverages spatial diversity through space-time network coding is proposed. The N source nodes are first divided into K clusters, each having Q nodes, and the clusters send data successively in a time-division multiple access way. Each node behaves as a decode-and-forward relay to other clusters, and uses linear coding to combine the local symbol and the relayed symbols. To separate the multi-source signals, each node has a unique signature waveform, and linear decorrelator is used at the receivers. Both the exact Symbol Error Rate (SER) and the asymptotic SER at high signal-to-noise ratios of the M-ary phase-shift keying signal are studied then. It is shown that a diversity order of (N - Q + 1) can be achieved with a low transmission delay of K time slots, which is more bandwidth efficient than the existing protocols. Simulation results also justify the performance gains.