Cooperative computation in wireless networks

Abstract

We study user cooperation in the context of physical-layer network coding. We examine a system in which users cooperatively transmit their messages to receivers whose task is to recover a finite-field linear combination of the users' messages. We present a cooperative scheme, based on a lattice-coding approach to block Markov encoding, that improves the computation rate over that of existing non-cooperative techniques. We apply our results to a simple relay network, showing that when inter-user gains are relatively strong, cooperative computation significantly improves network throughput.