Network Coding in Relay Networks

Transmission over wireless networks presents multiple technical challenges due to noise, interference, fading, power constraints and bandwidth limitation. Different solutions have been propposed to overcome these issues and some of them are treated here. Cooperative diversity has been proposed as an implementation for networks where terminals are restricted to using physical arrays; this technique implements space diversity by creating virtual antennas arrays with cooperating nodes in order to combat multipath fading. Network Coding recently has been presented as a technique to increase the throughput in multicast networks. Most of the work done on the topic considers an error free transmission and few works have taken into account the errors due to the nature of the wireless channel. This thesis proposes the use of network coding over some scenarios in relay networks, in order to obtain diversity. It also addresses some cooperative protocols and their performance in terms of bit error rate. Reliability criteria based on channel information are established for a practical network implementation. In short, we propose a scheme for a wireless network using ideas based on network coding.