Multi-source cooperative networks

Abstract

This report documents the analysis on simulated results of cooperative communication with different forwarding protocols at relay over two configuration environments Additive White Gaussian Noise and Rayleigh Fading Channel with Additive White Gaussian Noise. Cooperative communication exploits diversity and spatial gain using user cooperation in networks. However, this leads to bandwidth inefficiency and lower throughput in the network.

Bandwidth efficient xor-based network coding seems to solve the problems of spectral inefficiency in cooperative communication. Thus, network coding was cooperated to cooperative network to exploit spectral gain. Proposed two sources, single relay and one destination with one direct link from source to transmission system was simulated in order to study the performance of network coding in such networks.

The analysis has proved that although network coding provides spectral gain, the compensation for this benefit is that the system will have higher BER compared to traditional cooperative network.

Single relay network were extended to three relay network to study the necessity of network coding. Four different network models were proposed and in which each relay forward different data. BER performance analysis on multi-relay network suggests that xor-based network coding doesn’t really provide spectral efficiency in multi-relay network instead it creates more noises to the signal as it combines data packets from two or more users.