Network Coding for Cooperative MIMO Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

In this paper, we apply nonbinary network coding to a multiple access cooperative vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), where the vehicles have independent information to transmit to a common destination. We consider that all the users in the network are provided with multiple antennas (MIMO), so that the benefits of both space-time codes and cooperative communication are used to increase the network diversity order and consequently provide more reliable communication. A Nakagami-m fading model is considered, aiming to evaluate the reliability of the proposed scheme mainly in scenarios where the channel condition is critical (sub-Rayleigh scenario with m _<; 1). The network outage probability is obtained analytically, and confirmed by numerical results.