Parity-Check Network Coding for Multiple Access Relay Channel in Wireless Sensor Cooperative Communications

A recently developed theory suggests that network coding is a generalization of source coding and channel coding and thus yields a significant performance improvement in terms of throughput and spatial diversity. This paper proposes a cooperative design of a parity-check network coding scheme in the context of a two-source Multiple Access Relay Channel (MARC) model, a common compact model in hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The scheme uses Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) as the surrogate to build up a layered structure which encapsulates the multiple constituent LDPC codes in the source and relay nodes.