Joint Network/Channel Decoding over Noisy Wireless Networks

Network coding (NC) has gained much research attention as a potential candidate to solve the demand for higher spectral efficiency of modern wireless communications. Many research papers have investigated the performance of NC-aided networks such as throughput and outage capacity. However, the analysis of NC in practical systems where NC is combined with other techniques such as channel coding is still immature to fully understand its potential performance. In this thesis, we aim to design high performance receivers and analyze its performance for network-coded cooperative networks in practical scenarios. Firstly, we propose two Iterative Network/Channel Decoding (INCD) algorithms for the Multiple-Access Relay Channel (MARC) with two notable relaying schemes named Decode-and-Forward (DF) and Demodulate-and-Forward (DMF). The INCD algorithm operates based on turbo-like decoding methods and reduces the impact of the error propagation problem with the aid of a channel-aware receiver design. Both perfect Channel State Information (CSI) and imperfect CSI at the receiver side are investigated. We propose a practical method that forwards the quantized version of the relay decoding errors to the destination. It is shown that the proposed algorithms achieve full diversity gain and significantly outperforms solutions which do not take care of error propagation. We also show that the number of pilot symbols affects only the coding gain but has a negligible impact on the diversity order, while the quantization level affects both the diversity and coding gain. Secondly, we propose a Near Optimal Joint Network/Channel Decoding (NOJNCD) algorithm for the MARC that allows to analyze the system Bit Error Rate (BER). The NOJNCD algorithm performs network decoding and channel decoding in one decoding step of the super code, which comprises of all trellis states of individual code at the sources via NC. Furthermore, NC combined with Relay Selection (RS) is considered and the achievable diversity order is studied with the aid of outage analysis. We analytically show that Single Relay Selection (SRS) always achieves a diversity order two and Multiple Relay Selection (MRS) can achieve full diversity gain only when the number of selected relays exceeds the number of the