Throughput and outage for block-Markov encoding implementation with network coding for cooperative communications

In size constraint terminals like in cellular and sensor networks, cooperative communications have been proposed as one of the most efficient way to exploit the benefits of multiple antenna systems. The achievable rates and resulting diversity gains are dependent on information theoretic block-Markov coding. Practical implementation of this information theoretic code design with network coding, as an efficient and low cost option, has recently been proposed. In this paper, we further investigate the resulting benefits in terms of system throughput and outage probability. We also discuss the receiver structure to exploit the resulting cooperative network coding gains and the block-Markov coding in detail. The results show that network coding implementation of block-Markov coding provides considerable gains to cooperative communications.