Non-Coherent Near-Capacity Network Coding for Cooperative Multi-User Communications

Abstract

Near-capacity Non-coherent Cooperative Network-coding aided Multi-user (NNCNM) systems are designed with the aid of Extrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) charts for the sake of approaching the Differential Discrete-input Continuous-output Memoryless Channel's (D-DCMC) system capacity <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> . The upper and lower Frame Error Ratio (FER) performance bounds are derived for aiding our network coding design. The outage capacity of the D-DCMC channel is also calculated and used for computing the best-case performance bounds of both the corresponding single-link scheme and of the proposed NNCNM system. Moreover, a new technique referred to as the Pragmatic Algebraic Linear Equation Method (PALEM) was proposed for determining the exact number of information sources that may be recovered from the composite NNCNM stream, which constitutes a lower-complexity evaluation of the attainable FER performance of the NNCNM systems without resorting to high-complexity Monte-Carlo simulations. The NNCNM systems advocated are capable of operating within 0.3-0.5 dB from the corresponding D-DCMC capacity. A joint treatment of channel and network coding is considered in our system <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> . The design principles presented in this contribution may be extended to a vast range of NNCNM based systems using arbitrary channel coding schemes.