A Network-Coding Aided Road-Map of Large-Scale Near-Capacity Cooperative Communications

Abstract

In the paper, we present a road-map towards a near-capacity large-scale multi-user cooperativecommunications (NLMC) system, where all the evolution paths converge to the construction of the NLMC system. More specifically, we will summarize all relevant schemes appearing on the road-map in the unified frame-work of forward error correction. various network coding design paradigms are highlighted for illustrating how the NLMC systems might be designed for meeting diverse design criteria in the context of cooperative and cognitive communications, where the channel capacity of the NLMC systems is used for comparing the different design paradigms.INDEX TERMS Channel coding, network coding, cooperative communications.