Outage analysis of cooperative Space-Time codes with network coding

With the increasing demand of reliable communications on move, cooperative communications has proved to be an efficient solution to reduce the effects of unreliable nature of wireless channel. In this paper, we study the Space-Time (ST) cooperative communications aided by a fixed relay, forwarding network coded bits to the destination. We present the performance analysis in terms of outage probability. With analytical results, we show that the investigated scheme outperforms the cooperative transmission based on ST codes only. To be specific, the analytical results show that ST codes with the help of dedicated relay forwarding network coding can achieve diversity order of 3 while ST codes based cooperative communications, without use of network coding, only offers diversity order of 2.