A Fully Distributed Opportunistic Network Coding Scheme for Cellular Relay Networks

In this paper, we propose an opportunistic network coding (ONC) scheme in cellular relay networks, which operates depending on whether the relay decodes source messages successfully or not. A fully distributed method is presented to implement the proposed opportunistic network coding scheme without the need of any feedback between two network nodes. We consider the use of proposed ONC for cellular downlink transmissions and derive its closed-form outage probability expression considering cochannel interference in a Rayleigh fading environment. Numerical results show that the proposed ONC scheme outperforms the traditional non-cooperation in terms of outage probability. We also develop the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) of proposed ONC and show that the ONC scheme obtains the full diversity and an increased multiplexing gain as compared with the conventional cooperation protocols.