Abstract
In this paper, a novel transmission scheme which incorporates network coding into rateless transmission over relay networks is proposed. This technique allows partial information about the upcoming message block to be transmitted during the current block transmission, hence reducing the required number of transmissions and improving the spectral efficiency. Different techniques for applying network coding to several fading models are discussed, and their relationships to an erasure channel model is explained. An optimisation of the network coding weight is given, and we show that by choosing the weight that minimizes the duration of the current block transmission and sending sufficient information about subsequent block, we can improve the overall performance.