Path Selection Strategy for Network-Coded Cooperation with Decode-and-Forward Relay

Network coded cooperation (NCC) scheme combines both network coding (NC) and cooperative communication (CC) and has recently gained interest in multi-sources cooperative systems due to its ability to improve spectral efficiency and to increase the network throughput. In this paper, we consider a wireless communication system composed of two users, a single decode and forward (DF) relay, and a single destination. We propose a scheme that combines both the NCC scheme and path selection (PS) strategy and denoted by network coded cooperation path selection (NCCPS) scheme. To quantify the proposed NCCPS performance, both the outage probability and the mean spectral efficiency (MSE) of the NCCPS are investigated over Nakagami-m fading channels. Simulation results show that our proposed NCCPS strategy outperforms NCC and achieves better coding gain and better MSE for symmetric channels. For asymmetric channels, when the direct channels are stronger than the source-relay-destination, our proposed strategy also achieves better outage probability and MSE. For the case when the source relay destination channels are stronger, our proposed scheme achieves the same performance as NCC since they will be the same scheme. Furthermore, when we compare it with NCC with two relays and use relay selection, NCCPS achieves better performance at low SNR values.