Analysis and performance of network decoding strategies for cooperative network coding

In this work, we present two new low-complexity network decoding strategies for cooperative network coding in a multiple-access relay channel scenario. For these two strategies, Selection and Soft Combining and Majority Vote Network Decoding, along with the optimal joint network decoding, we derive expressions for bit error probability performance as a function of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the different Rayleigh fading links, and show the tightness of the derived bounds through simulation results. The two proposed schemes provide a similar bit error probability (BEP) performance compared to the optimal scheme, while having significantly lower complexity. Further, we study the effect of user pairing on the error performance by considering different SNRs on the user and relay links towards the destination. It is also shown that the error performance of the different schemes follows the same trend for a given user pairing strategy.