Achievable Rate Analysis in Network-Coded Cooperative Communications with Multiple Relay Nodes

Network-coded cooperative communications (NC-CC) refers to the use of network coding (NC) in cooperative communications (CC). Prior studies have shown that NC has the potential to improve the performance of CC when there are multiple sessions in the wireless network. These studies were done for the case when multiple sessions are sharing a single relay node. However, how NC-CC behaves when multiple relay nodes are employed remains an open problem. In this paper, we explore this problem by analyzing the achievable rate of each session in this setting. We develop closed form formulas for the mutual information and the achievable data rate for each session and show that prior results for a single relay is a special case of our result. Our findings in this paper offer an important building block on the theory of NC-CC. To demonstrate the application of our theoretical result, we apply it in a numerical study to understand the impact on a session's achievable rate when different sets of relay nodes are employed in NC-CC.