Relay-based cooperative communication has become a research focus in recent years because it can achieve diversity gain in wireless networks. In existing works, network coding and two-path relay are adopted to deal with the increase of network size and the half-duplex nature of relay, respectively. To further improve bandwidth efficiency, we propose a novel cooperative transmission scheme which combines network coding and two-path relay together in a multi-source system. Due to the utilization of two-path relay, our proposed scheme achieves full-rate transmission. Adopting complex field network coding (CFNC) at both sources and relays ensures that symbols from different sources are allowed to be broadcast in the same time slot. We also adopt physical-layer network coding (PNC) at relay nodes to deal with the inter-relay interference caused by the twopath relay. With careful process design, the ideal throughput of our scheme achieves by 1 symbol per source per time slot (sym/S/TS). Furthermore, the theoretical analysis provides a method to estimate the symbol error probability (SEP) and throughput in additive complex white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh fading channels. The simulation results verify the improvement achieved by the proposed scheme.Index Terms-complex field network coding; two-path relay; inter-relay interference; physical-layer network coding; throughput.Although CFNC allows simultaneous transmissions from all sources, 2L TSs are required to complete the transmission of L symbols for each source due to the half-duplex nature of relay. On the other hand, existing researches on two-path relay only consider single-source models. With the increase of network size, the single-source models in [10]-[14] cannot be directly generalized to multi-source systems with simultaneous transmissions at sources. Therefore, in order to further improve bandwidth efficiency, we propose a novel transmission scheme based on two-path relay in multi-source wireless networks. Our scheme combines network coding and two-path relay together in a (multisource,2-relay,1-destination) system. To allow simultaneous transmissions of all sources, CFNC is operated before transmission. With the help of two-path relay, full-rate transmission of multi-source system is achieved. We use physical-layer network coding at relay nodes to deal with the IRI caused by two-path relay and the interference is successfully canceled at destination. Only L + 1 TSs are needed to send L symbols for each source. Compared with CFNC, our proposed cooperative transmission in (N S , 2, 1) system achieves ideal throughput as high as 1 sym/S/TS, twice as high as that of CFNC in [3]. Compared with [10]- [14], multi-source model, rather than single-source, is introduced to two-path relay system without requirements for additional TSs and resource blocks. Besides, theoretical analysis and simulation results also demonstrate the improvement of our scheme's performance.The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section II depicts the system model. Section I...