Copyright © 2012 Guoyou Li et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We present a multiuser cooperative transmission scheme with opportunistic network coding (CTONC), which can improve system performance. In contrast to direct transmission and conventional cooperative transmission, the CTONC allows the relay node to decide whether or not to help do cooperation and employ network coding based on the limited feedback from the destinations. It will not help a transmission pair unless its direct transmission fails. This enables CTONC to make efficient use of the degrees of freedom of the channels. We derive and analyze the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff for the CTONC over Rayleigh fading channels at finite signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). Theoretical analysis and numerical results show that the proposed scheme achieves better performance gain in terms of average mutual information, outage probability, and finite-SNR diversity-multiplexing tradeoff.