Joint hierarchical modulation and network coding for asymmetric data transmission in wireless cooperative communication

Asymmetric data transmission is a challenge factor in wireless communication channel. In this paper, we study the issue of data processing in asymmetric data transmission from different sources in wireless communication channel, and propose a Joint Hierarchical Modulation and Network Coding (JHMNC) scheme. In the proposed scheme, the procedure of JHMNC is analyzed and compared with the traditional zero padding and Opportunistic User Selection (OUS) schemes which are the generally existed schemes in asymmetric data transmission in wireless channel, and the closed-form expressions of the End-to-End (E2E) Bit Error Rate (BER) for the aforementioned schemes are derived by analyzing the transmission of each node. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed scheme improves the BER performance without additional complexity compared with the traditional zero padding scheme, also can outperform OUS scheme in terms of the average throughput and the channel access probability.