On Performance of Cooperative Multicast System with Wireless Network Coding

Considering a cooperative multicast system where 2 sources transmit data to 2 users with the help of 1 relay (2-1-2), the performance of a network coded cooperative (NCC)transmission scheme is evaluated. Due to the use of network coding, more than one source node can be served simultaneously by one cooperative transmission. As a result, the time resource consumed by the cooperative transmission is reduced and the spectral efficiency is significantly increased. In this paper, to facilitate performance evaluation, three information-theoretic metrics, i.e., ergodic capacity, outage probability and diversity gain are studied. Both analytical and numerical results show that the NCC scheme can significantly improve ergodic capacity, while achieving almost the same outage probability and the same diversity gain as the conventional scheme.