Cooperative Space-Time Codes With Opportunistic Network Coding

Cooperative communications has emerged as one of the most efficient way of exploiting spatial diversity in wireless communications. Cooperative communications is a strategy where users, besides transmitting their own information, also relay re-encoded version of other users' information to a common destination. In this paper, the authors investigate a scheme called Space-Time (ST) coded cooperation with opportunistic network coding, which further enhances the cooperative communications benefits. In this paper, two cooperating users using ST codes are taken. A third user, which is not demanding any service during the transmission of cooperating user, is used to send network coded message to the destination.