Outage performance analysis of multi-source cooperative networks exploiting network coding

It has been shown that, in multi-source multi-relay networks, the use of network coding that utilizes cooperation among intra-cluster nodes can improve the outage performance. When each node is equipped with a single antenna, the relay-destination link will become the bottleneck that limits the overall network diversity gain. In this paper, we propose the use of multiple antennas at the destination node to enable the network diversity gain and consequently improve the overall outage performance. Analysis of the outage probability is presented to provide insightful understanding of the performance for three different protocols with the use of different numbers of destination antennas. Numerical results confirm the analytical results and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed cooperative network schemes.