Wireless Network Cocast: Cooperative communications with Space-Time Network coding
The concept of STNC is very general. Fundamentally, it involves combining information from different sources at a relay node, which gives rise to the concept of network coding, and transmitting the combined signals in dedicated time slots from various locations in a network, which makes the space-time concept. Various traditional combining techniques can be used, including CDMA-like and OFDMA-like techniques, transform-based techniques with the use of Hadamard and Vandermonde matrices, and traditional network coding. However, a major distinction is that the combining of symbols from different sources happens inside a transmitter instead of through the air. Below is an overview of the developed STNCs.