Location-Aware Cooperative Communications Utilizing Linear Network Coding

Cooperative communication can be used to reduce the transmit power of distant mobile units, compared to conventional direct transmission, given the same quality-of-service. However, imposing the constraint of having orthogonal transmission for the source and relays leads to large delay in TDMA systems. For a network of N mobile units, the transmission delay would be N(N +1)/2. In this paper, the authors propose a location-aware cooperation-based scheme that aims to reduce transmit power of distant mobile units while maintaining a low transmission delay. The scheme utilizes a linear network coding protocol, where each mobile unit applies linear network coding to a set of transmit symbols that it has received previously.