SUMMARY
A network‐coded cooperative relaying aided free‐space optical (FSO) transmission scheme is designed. The resultant multiple‐source cooperation diversity is exploited by the relay to mitigate the strong turbulence‐induced fading experienced in FSO channels. At the destination, an iterative multiple source detection algorithm is proposed in conjunction with a chip‐level soft network decoding method. Our performance evaluation results using simulation analysis demonstrate that the proposed FSO multiple source detection is capable of approaching the single‐user‐bound for transmission over Gamma–Gamma turbulence channels. Also, the network‐coded cooperative FSO scheme can achieve a significant BER improvement in comparison with conventional noncooperation schemes. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.