A novel cooperative Virtual-MIMO structure using Random Network Coding

Random Network Coding (RNC) has emerged as an important technology in wireless communication. The present paper proposes a novel cooperative Virtual-MIMO (V-MIMO) structure by applying RNC to the cooperative transmission. Then the diversity gain of the RNC-based cooperative strategy is analyzed and compared with the conventional cooperative strategies. Higher diversity gain or multiplexing gain can be achieved by the RNC-based cooperative V-MIMO. Besides, the proposed cooperative strategy is beneficial to some practical applications like unsymmetrical requested data rate and users' data security. Finally, the performance is evaluated through numerical simulation. The simulation results verify the theoretical analysis. The RNC-based cooperation scheme has higher diversity gain or multiplexing gain than other cooperation schemes. Moreover, the results show that the system outage probabilities of all cooperation schemes in the scenario with inter-user outage are higher than that in the scenario without inter-user outage.