Relaying Selection with Network-coded Cooperative Protocols in Aeronautical Communications

In this article, we exploit the idea of network-coded cooperative protocol in aeronautical communications which combines different source nodes'information at the relay and joint decoding at the destination. Recently, the network coding in cooperative communications has been categorized into two mainstreams, bit-level and signal-level combinations, which are both discussed in the article. And to be exclusively, multiple access relay channel(MARC) is adopted. The mutual information expressions of both above-cited network-coded protocols are deduced, which prove that without proper selected relays to perform network coding, the spatial diversity of the proposed protocol cannot be obtained. This then leads to search for the selection and grouping algorithms. An adjacency matrix is defined to describe the connectivity of the nodes in one radio contact disk, so that, the selection and grouping of algorithm is equivalent to constructing this adjacency matrix to minimize the system outage probability evaluated in term of the mutual information. Besides, a network-coded cooperative protocol requires the acyclic network, of which the construction is to avoid loop-4 in the matrix. The article ends with simulations to demonstrate the viability of the proposed algorithms.