C OOPERATIVE C OMMUNICATIONS BASED ON
R ATELESS N ETWORK C ODING IN D ISTRIBUTED
MIMO S YSTEMS
Xiangming Li, Tao Jiang, Shuguang Cui, Jianping An, and Qian Zhang
Abstract— In cellular distributed antenna systems (DASs),
cooperation among base stations (BSs) or remote antenna units
(RAUs) to exploit multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) gains
could mitigate interferences as well as provide more spatial
diversity, which could significantly improve the overall spectrum
efficiency. However, most existing cooperation schemes require
perfect synchronization, which is difficult and even impossible in
practical distributed multi-user systems. When synchronization
is not perfect, cooperative communication performance severely
degrades. Orthogonal channel assignment among collaborating
Manuscript received Aug. 15, 2009; revised Dec. 31, 2009. The work
presented in this paper was supported in part by the NSF of China with
Grants 60872008, 60972017 and 60972018, the Program for New Century
Excellent Talents in University of China under Grant NCET-08-0217, and
the Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of the
Ministry of Education of China under Grants 200804871142, 20070007019,
and 20091101110019, and the Excellent Young Teachers Program of MOE,
PRC with grant 20091101120028, and research grants from RGC under
Contracts CERG 622407, 622508, RPC0607.EG05 and N HKUST60907, and
the NSFC Oversea Young Investigator Grant under Grant 60629203, the NSF
of USA with Grants CNS-0721935 and CCF-0726740, and the DoD of USA
with Grants HDTRA-07-1-0037 and HDTRA-08-1-0010.
Xiangming Li is with the School of Information and Electronics Engineer-
ing, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, P. R. China (e-mail:
xiangming li@ieee.org).
Tao Jiang is with the Department of Electronics and Information Engineer-
ing, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, P. R.
China (e-mail: Tao.Jiang@ieee.org).
Shuguang Cui is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engi-
neering, Texas A&M University, TX 77843, USA (cui@ece.tamu.edu).
Jianping An is with the School of Information and Electronics Engineer-
ing, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, P. R. China (e-mail:
an@bit.edu.cn).
Qian Zhang is with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Kowloon, Hong kong (e-
mail: qianzh@cse.ust.hk).
stations with rateless network coding allows synchronization to
be performed independently, and provides a coding scheme with
close-to-capacity performance. In this article, we discuss how to
construct cooperative communication schemes based on rateless
network coding in distributed MIMO systems. Specifically, we
propose two cooperation strategies: single-source cooperation
based on rateless coding and multi-source cooperation based on
rateless network coding. The proposed cooperative strategies are
applicable to both uplink cooperation among users and downlink
cooperation among BSs or RAUs in cellular DAS, providing
a parameter-flexible, encoding-simple, and bandwidth-efficient
cooperative solution.
Index Terms— Distributed MIMO, distributed antenna system,
diversity, rateless coding.
I. INTRODUCTION
Recently, distributed multiple-input multiple-output
(MIMO) or distributed antenna systems (DAS), which
allow the exploration of various MIMO gains over spatially
collaborative nodes, have been shown to be capable
of significantly increasing the system capacity [1]–[4].
Specifically, in distributed MIMO systems, some neighboring
nodes such as base stations (BSs), remote antenna units
(RAUs) or users in a particular geographic area can share
their antennas in a cooperative manner and generate a
virtual MIMO system [5]–[8]. When the cooperative nodes
are BSs, RAUs, and users, the cooperation is referred as
BS cooperation, RAU cooperation, and user cooperation,
respectively. In such virtual MIMO systems, transmissions of
cooperatively coded signals from different locations lead to
spatial diversity, which effectively combats channel fading and
shadowing. In particular, when it is hard to obtain diversity
with a single BS or RAU (e.g., channels varies slowly
IEEE WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. XX, NO. Y, MONTH 2010
such that the time diversity is not available), cooperative
spatial diversity is critical. Moreover, when multiple BSs or
RAUs transmit signals in a cooperative way, the cochannel
interference is effectively mitigated. As a result, the overall
system spectrum efficiency could be greatly improved via
virtual MIMO systems.
Obviously, both uplink user and downlink BS or RAU
cooperations in distributed MIMO systems can increase the
spectrum efficiency by providing more spatial diversity and
better interference mitigation. However, most existing schemes
assume that the signals transmitted from different nodes arrive
at the same destination synchronously. For example, perfect
synchronization is explicitly assumed for the downlink BS
cooperation at multicell multiuser MIMO networks in [9], the
coded cooperation at distributed multi-user wireless networks
in [10], and the amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward
user cooperation in [5]. However, for cooperative communica-
tions with multiple transmitters and a single destination, it is
hard for the multiple transmitters to align their transmissions
such that signals intended for the single destination arrive at
the same time. For the cases with multiple sources to multiple
destinations, it is even more challenging to align all the signals
even if perfect cooperation is assumed among the transmitting
nodes. Therefore, in practical communication systems, it is
only practical to assume quasi-synchronization for distributed
multi-user networks. Nevertheless, when synchronization is
not perfect, cooperative communication performance severely
degrades [6]. On the other hand, high accuracy synchroniza-
tion requires complex control mechanisms and extra control
messages, such that both system complexity and bandwidth
demands are high.
To improve the overall spectrum efficiency, frequency reuse
or spatial multiplexing is often deployed in practical wire-
less communication systems with various channel assignment
strategies. In the cellular system, each cell is usually assigned
a group of radio channels that are completely different from
that in its neighbor cells, and the BS transmission is controlled
to achieve the desired coverage within the particular cell.
Therefore, if we could limit the coverage area to be within a
finite area, the same group of channels may be used to cover
different cells that are separated far enough from each other
such that the co-channel interference levels are within tolerable
limits [11]. Within a resource group, the channels can be allo-
cated in an orthogonal way: When multiple user equipments
(UEs) are active, they are assigned with orthogonal channels
with different frequency bands, different codes, different time
slots, or different spatial streams for uplink and downlink
transmissions. Such a scheme is referred as the orthogonal
channel assignment strategy, where each UE performs syn-
chronization and channel estimation independently, without
regarding its neighboring UEs. Since the orthogonal channel
assignment strategy is of practical significance, cooperative
communications based on such a channel assignment scheme
is addressed in this article.
In cooperative communications for the general ad hoc net-
works, the channels between nodes are usually non-ideal. For
example, when the source node broadcasts signals, each part-
ner in a cooperative group only receives a channel-corrupted
2
signal. As a result, the cooperative communication perfor-
mance heavily depends on the diversified inter-node signal
to interference plus noise ratios (SINRs). However, in certain
practical wireless communication networks, it is possible that
reliable connections are available within a cooperative group.
For example, in cellular networks, the collaborating BSs are
connected through a central office via a high-speed optical
fiber network, or the collaborating UEs within a small geo-
graphic area may be connected with reliable short-range links
such as a high-speed wireless local area network (WLAN).
When a group of nodes are connected reliably, these nodes
build a virtual DAS; thus they could work conveniently as a
team to communicate cooperatively with other nodes outside
the group. In addition, if each node in a cooperative group is
assigned one or more orthogonal channels as discussed earlier,
cooperation could be implemented with low complexity, since
each transmission could perform synchronization and channel
estimation independently.
In a practical wireless system, such as the cellular system,
each node participating in cooperation not only helps other
nodes but also transmits its own data. Therefore, it is desirable
for each node to contribute only part of channel resources
to cooperate. In other words, only partial cooperation is
performed at each node. For example, let us consider a team
consisting of three nodes: A, B, and C, to perform cooperative
communications. Each node may contribute a part of its
channels to participate in the transmissions from a particular
source node, say A. Due to the time-varying nature of the
underlying system, the percentage that a node contributes
to help A may change from time to time. As an example,
during the cooperation period 1, A may contribute 40% of
its total resource, B may contribute 30% of its total resource,
and C may contribute 35% of its total resource, for the data
transmission from A. During the cooperation period 2, the
percentages that A, B, and C contribute to cooperation may
change to 55%, 35%, and 45%, respectively. Since the total
resource for the transmission may change from time to time
with no a prior information, a pre-designed fixed-rate channel
code is difficult to be applied to such a rate varying application.
Therefore, to achieve efficient time-varying partial cooperation
among multiple networked nodes, it is natural and useful
to combine rateless coding and networked transmissions for
cooperative communications.
With rateless codes, a sequence of K input symbols are
encoded to a potentially infinitely-long stream of parity-check
symbols. The transmission of a rateless codeword is termi-
nated once the receiver sends an acknowledgement (ACK)
to the transmitter via a feedback channel, when the source
messages are reconstructed correctly. As suggested by its
name, a rateless code does not have a fixed rate, but rather
has the rate determined on the fly by the time when the
receiver decodes the message correctly. As such, rateless codes
have the merits of fully exploiting every transmitted symbol
to approach the channel capacity. Recently, some works on
rateless codes have found that a class of rateless codes known
as the extended irregular repeat-accumulate (eIRA) codes not
only have low encoding and decoding complexity, but also
have capacity-achieving or capacity-approaching performance
IEEE WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. XX, NO. Y, MONTH 2010 3

over certain channels, e.g., additive white Gaussian noise
(AWGN) channels and Rayleigh fading channels [12], [13].
The eIRA code can be constructed as follows. Let m =
[m1 , m2 , · · · , mK ] be the binary source message. Then, the
codeword v = [v1 , v2 , · · · , vN ] can be generated as: v1 = m1 ,
vj = vj−1 + ms1 + ms2 + · · · + msdj for j > 1, where the
additions are modulo 2. The symbols, ms1 , ms2 , · · · , msdj are
dj distinct source symbols, which can be generated uniformly
at random, where dj is a non-zero integer standing for the
encoding degree of the symbol vj . The encoding degree dj
can be a fixed integer, or a random integer chosen from any
given probability distribution. It has been observed that such
codes are efficiently encodable in a flexible way, which makes
them highly suitable for the time-varying partial cooperation
scenario as discussed above. In addition, eIRA codes are a
class of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, which can
be decoded in low complexity with belief-propagation (BP) or
sum-product algorithms. Moreover, when we assume that each
node in a cooperative group perfectly knows what information
the other nodes have in the same group, which is possible when
the cooperating nodes are connected with high-speed links,
these nodes could deploy network coding [14], [15] for more
efficient transmissions. In this article, we study the partial
cooperation problem with rateless network coding, particularly
for the UE, BS or RAU cooperations in cellular and DAS
systems.
The rest of the article is organized as follows. In Section II,
we build the system model with partial cooperation based on
rateless network coding. In Section III, simulation results are
spatially separated antenna nodes, i.e., RAUs, are connected
to a common entity, i.e., a central unit (CU), that manipulates
the overall wireless service within a particular geographic area.
Specifically, an RAU consists of the transmitting and receiving
radio frequency (RF) components and the minimum process-
ing unit, acting as an RF transreceiver, as well as undertaking
part of baseband signal processing tasks such as constellation
mapping and data packetizing. A CU is the central control
and signal processing unit, undertaking most of the control
and signal processing tasks including the RAU control, power
control, channel estimation, coding and decoding, modulation
and demodulation, and so on. Moreover, RAUs are assumed to
be connected to a CU through fiber or wired links of a reliable
high capacity, such that data transmissions between RAUs and
the CU experience negligible time delays and bit errors.
BS
UE21
UE11
Group 2:
Group 1: Wireless
UE12
Wired LAN LAN
UE13
UE22 UE23

conducted to verify the performance of the proposed system

model, followed by the conclusions in Section IV.
UE14 UE24

: Wired link
II. C OOPERATIVE C OMMUNICATION WITH R ATELESS
(a) : Wireless link
N ETWORK C ODING (b)
Virtual
Virtual D S FF F R P

RAU
CU: Central unit Server CU
RAU: Remote antenna unit RAU UE
BS: Base station RAU
UE: User equipment BS
BS
Virtual
UE
UE RAU
CU
Virtual
BS
RAU D S F F FR P

RAU
RAU
Virtual
RAU
BS
: Fiber or wired link
: Wireless link
RAU (c)
RAU

(a) Base-station cooperation (b) Distributed antenna system

Fig. 2. Uplink cooperative communications based on virtual DAS.

Fig. 1. Downlink cooperation model for the cellular and distributed antenna
systems.
In Fig. 1, we show two possible network topologies for
downlink cooperation in a cellular DAS. In the BS coopera-
tion, as shown in Fig. 1-(a), all the BSs exchange information
through the backbone network of high capacity. For simplicity,
the backbone network is not shown here. Furthermore, we
assume that the data exchanging between any two BSs is error-
free and delay-free. In the DAS as shown in Fig. 1-(b), a set of
For uplink cooperation, it is also possible to establish
reliable short-range communications among the collaborating
UEs. For example, such reliable short-range communications
could be realized via WLAN, FSO, or even wired LAN, where
Fig. 2-(a) and Fig. 2-(b) show two examples of team-based
UE cooperation for uplink transmissions in a cellular system.
Within the team, UEs first construct a local network via wire-
less or wired links of high capacity and high reliability; UEs
could then select a server UE to handle the central processing
tasks necessary for performing external communications with
IEEE WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. XX, NO. Y, MONTH 2010 4

one or more BSs via cooperative schemes. In such a way, the
team-based uplink transmission can be modeled as a virtual
DAS where the common UEs and the server UE act as the
virtual RAU and the virtual CU, respectively, as shown in
Fig. 2-(c). With the above setup, we expect to increase the
overall data rate of the uplink transmission by cooperative
communications with the virtual DAS.
For the convenience of description, from now on we call
a UE, a BS, or an RAU as a station for both the uplink and
downlink cooperations. A group of stations constitute a team to
perform cooperative communications with another particular
set of stations. Assume that the orthogonal channel assignment
strategy is used, and the transmission resource assigned to
a particular station in a cooperative group is represented by
a given number of symbols supported during a transmis-
sion (a transmission means a certain time duration of data
transmission). Two cooperation strategies: single-source partial
cooperation with rateless coding and multi-source cooperation
with rateless network coding, will be discussed next.
A. Proposed single-source cooperation with rateless coding
Station 1
Transmitter
N1
symbols
modulation
q-ary Rateless Transmission
as the general LDPC or Turbo codes (TC), for every code
rare R, a new codebook must be constructed, which means
that a lot of codebooks should be designed and stored at
the transmitters and receivers in advance. Obviously, this is
rather impractical since the supportable rate in a particular
cooperation system may take an arbitrary value in the range
(0, 1) at each time instant. On the other hand, rateless codes
such as eIRA codes [13] that have capacity-achieving or
capacity-approaching performance over various channels with
low encoding and decoding complexity, are naturally good
solutions for the partial cooperation problem considered here.
As shown in Fig. 3, one or more stations may dynamically and
continuously adjust their contribution according to the channel
state condition, until they receive the termination signal from
the destination, which indicates that the source information
could now be decoded correctly. Moreover, eIRA codes are
a class of irregular LDPC codes. Thus even if no feedback
channels are available for termination signals, rateless codes
can still be good forward error correction (FEC) codes flexibly
providing various required code rates.
Therefore, the single-source partial cooperation at each
time instant could be performed as follows: 1) Each station
involved in the cooperation determines the contribution factor
Ni ; 2) The source station collects Ni , i =P 1, 2, · · · , T , and
T
calculates the code rate R = K/N = K/ i=1 Ni ; 3) The
q-ary
source station generates N encoded symbols using a rateless
code and assigns these encoded symbols to collaborating
stations according to the values of Ni ’s. Equivalently, the
…

Source coding station

K N
scheduler Station T encoding operations could also be performed in a distributional
source symbols encoded symbols
over GF(q) over GF(q) NT
q-ary
modulation
way: The i-th station generates Ni encoded symbols that it
symbols
transmits, which could be easily done sequentially if the (i−1)-
Single termination signal (optional) th station sends its encoding status to the i-th station after it
Receiver generates its Ni−1 encoded symbols.
N=N1+…+NT
Belief- Demodulator
Sink propagation
K decoder Soft
and
combiner B. Proposed multi-source cooperation with rateless network
decoded symbols input of N
over GF(q) received symbols coding

Fig. 3. Partial cooperation with rateless coding.

Station 1 K1 Network coding based Station 1
source symbols transmitter N1
q-ary over GF(q) symbols q-ary
Fig. 3 depicts the proposed configuration of single-source Source K=K1+…+KT modulation
Transmission
partial cooperation with rateless coding. In each transmis- Rateless
…

network station
sion, a single source node in the cooperative group wants Station KT coding N scheduler
encoded symbols
Station T

to transmit K source symbols to a destination outside the q-ary

Source
KT
source symbols
over GF(q)
NT
q-ary
modulation
group. Suppose a total of T stations (including the source over GF(q) symbols

station) in the cooperative group could participate in the Single termination signal (optional)

cooperative communication, and Ni (i = 1, 2, · · · , T ) denotes The i-th receiver

N=N1+…+NT
the number of transmission symbols contributed by the i- Belief- Demodulator
Data
th cooperative station.
PT We have the total number of coded
Sink i extractor
propagation
decoder
and
Ki K Soft combiner
symbols as N = i=1 Ni and we assume N > K, where decoded symbols decoded symbols input of N
Over GF(q) Over GF(q) received symbols
the K-symbol source information is encoded into an N -
symbol codeword via a particular channel coding scheme,
and thus the code rate is R = K/N . Note that Ni may
Fig. 4. Multi-user cooperation with rateless network coding.
change from time to time as we discussed earlier. Therefore,
the overall codeword length N is time varying and the code
rate R is not fixed. As such, if we deploy the conventional Fig. 4 shows a typical communication system deploying
adaptive coding technique with fixed-rate coding schemes such the proposed multi-source cooperation scheme with rateless
IEEE WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. XX, NO. Y, MONTH 2010
network coding, in which the i-th station transmits Ki source
symbols to a particular destination outside the group during
each transmission period, and its total transmission capacity
is denoted as Mi , i = 1, 2, · · · , T P
, with T the total
PTnumber
T
of stations in the group. Let K = i=1 Ki , M = i=1 Mi ,
and suppose M > K. Here, Mi is not necessarily constant
over time just as Ni does in the previous section. Unlike the
single-source partial cooperation with rateless coding, where
each station contributes only part of its transmission capacity
for cooperation, in the multi-source cooperation, we assume
that each station contributes all its transmission capacity in
the collaborative pool. Obviously, the code rate could be set as
R = K/M , which means that K1 , K2 , · · · , KT symbols from
the T stations in the cooperative group are concatenated in
series to form a K-symbol source message and then encoded
into M symbols. The encoded symbols are then assigned to
the T stations for collaborative transmissions according to
their transmission capacity Mi ’s. With a similar argument to
that for the single-source cooperation case, rateless coding
could be deployed to achieve the cooperation flexibility as
well as the low encoding and decoding complexity. At the
i-th destination, the M symbols from the T stations are
combined and then decoded using the belief propagation (BP)
algorithm, where the corresponding Ki source symbols are
extracted. Destination i sends a termination signal when it
successfully decodes its own data; while all the transmitters
stop the transmissions when all the T termination signals are
received.
Accordingly, the multi-source cooperation with rateless
network coding is operated as follows: 1) Select a station,
called as virtual server, to undertake the necessary central
processing tasks such as common data collection and control,
where the virtual server could be any of the stations in the
team, selected either by willingness or user designation; 2) The
virtual server collects
PT the source messages, PT source parameters,
computes K = i=1 Ki and M = i=1 Mi , and calculates
PT
the code rate R = K/M = K/ i=1 Mi ; 3) The virtual
server generates M encoded symbols using a rateless code
and assigns these encoded symbols to collaborating stations
according to the values of Mi ’s. Equivalently, the encoding op-
erations in Step 3) could be performed in a distributional way.
We see that the procedures of the multi-source cooperation are
similar to that of the single-source cooperation, except that the
multi-source cooperation needs a virtual server, which is not
a major issue when we assume that the cooperative nodes are
connected via high-speed links.
Obviously, the multi-source cooperation with rateless net-
work coding is suitable for both multi-station to single-station
and multi-station to multi-station communications. In addition,
for the uplink cooperative communications based on virtual
DAS as shown in Fig. 2, all the UEs want to communicate
with the BS. Since the BS needs to decode all the data streams,
naturally a multi-source rateless network coding [14], [15]
could be applied. Similarly, in the BS cooperation case as
shown in Fig. 1, if each BS wants to transmit an indepen-
dent data stream to a common UE, the BSs may combine
the messages and jointly encode them with rateless network
coding. Moreover, the multi-source cooperation performance
5
can be further improved by allocating different transmitting
power levels among the transmitting stations according to their
individual channel conditions. However, to implement power
allocation in an optimal way, the transmitters need to know
all the channel state information, which is not covered in this
paper.
Note that in the proposed two cooperation strategies, we
have a few stations cooperating to transmit messages with the
orthogonal channel assignment. That is, a rateless codeword
is divided into a few parts and assigned to several orthogonal
channels. In such a way, it is expected that synchronization
could be implemented with low complexity since each orthog-
onal channel corresponding to an independent stream could
execute synchronization independently.
III. S IMULATION R ESULTS
To verify the performance of the proposed cooperation
schemes with rateless coding in terms of frame error rate
(FER), simulation results are presented in this section.
For fair comparisons, we consider a coded baseline system
with the same overall rate of 1/2 for all cases: noncooper-
ative, 2-station cooperation, 3-station cooperation, 4-station
cooperation, 8-station cooperation, 12-station cooperation, 20-
station cooperation, and ∞-station cooperation. The ∞-station
cooperation stands for the case that a sufficiently large num-
ber of stations perform cooperative communications. In the
conducted computer simulations, the encoding is performed
over the finite field GF (4) with quadrature phase-shift keying
(QPSK) modulation, K = 500, N = 1000, and M = 1000.
Therefore, the bandwidth efficiency is 1.0 bit/s/Hz for all
cases. The wireless channel is assumed to be quasi-static
Rayleigh fading; thus the path gains are constant complex
Gaussian random variables over a transmission period and vary
from one frame to another. For the ∞-station cooperation, it is
equivalent to transmissions over a fast fading channel, where
the channel varies from symbol to symbol. In other words,
when a large number of stations participate in cooperation, the
spatial diversity mechanism is equivalent to the time diversity
in fast fading channels. The path gains are modeled as inde-
pendent samples of a complex Gaussian random variable with
zero mean and variance 0.5 per real dimension. The rateless
codes adopted are eIRA codes since they could be encoded
efficiently and decoded with low complexity by using the BP
decoding algorithm [12], [13]. Moreover, eIRA codes could
provide uniformly good performance over fading channels at
various rates and code lengths.
To avoid the symbol conversion from binary to non-binary
at the transmitter and the soft-information conversion from
non-binary to binary for BP decoding at the receiver, non-
binary rateless codes are used in the conducted simulations.
In particular, the original rateless codes studied in [12],
[13] are binary codes, while in this paper, we modify the
non-binary rateless codes to be over GF (q) for cooperative
communications with high bandwidth efficiency. Specifically,
let m = [m1 , m2 , · · · , mK ] be the source information vector,
where mi is defined over GF (q), for i = 1, 2, · · · , K. Let
v = [v1 , v2 , · · · , vN ] denote the codeword. The encoding
IEEE WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. XX, NO. Y, MONTH 2010
symbol vj is generated as: v1 = m1 , vj = vj−1 + mj for
1 < j ≤ K, and vj = vj−1 +c1 ·ms1 +c2 ·ms2 +· · ·+cd ·msd
for j > K, where the operations are over GF (q), d is the
encoding degree, and c1 , c2 , · · · , cd are d non-zero encoding
coefficients from the finite field GF (q), which are chosen
uniformly at random. The column degree distribution of the
first K columns of the parity-check matrix for the eIRA code
is uniform. In our simulations, we set q = 4 and d = 3.
0
10
-1
10
Frame error rate
-2
10
-3
10
-4
10
0 5 10 15
Eb/N0 (dB)
20 25
Fig. 5. FER vs. SNR without cooperation and with rateless network coding
based cooperation, respectively.
Fig. 5 shows different results of FER versus SNR for
the proposed rateless coding based cooperative communica-
tions. The performance results apply to both the single-source
partial cooperation and the multi-source cooperation with
the following setup. For the single-source cooperation with
rateless coding, T stations form a team to perform cooperative
communication. Each station participating in the cooperative
transmission equally contributes Ni = N/T encoded symbols
during a transmission period. For the multi-source cooperation,
T stations work together as a team to perform cooperative
communication, and each station has K/T source symbols to
transmit during a transmission period. Moreover, each station
transmits M/T encoded symbols during a transmission period.
It is obvious from Fig. 5 that cooperation schemes outperform
non-cooperation schemes and the FER improves over the
number of cooperative stations.
IV. C ONCLUSIONS
In this article, we studied the cooperative communication
schemes with rateless coding to exploit MIMO diversity gains.
Two cooperation strategies: single-source partial cooperation
with rateless coding and multi-user cooperation with rateless
network coding, were proposed. Simulation results verified
that the proposed cooperation strategies provide a parameter-
flexible, encoding-simple, and bandwidth-efficient solution for
distributed MIMO systems.
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IEEE WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. XX, NO. Y, MONTH 2010
Xiangming Li (M’06) received the Ph.D degree in
Communication and Information Engineering from
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunica-
tions, Beijing, China in 2000. From Aug. 2000 to
Jan. 2002, he worked at Agilent Technologies as a
Software Engineer. From Jan. 2002 to June 2003,
he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department
of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Concordia
University, Canada and the Department of Electronic
Engineering, City University of Hong Kong. From June 2003 to Dec. 2005, he
was an Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Information
Engineering, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China.
From Jan. 2006 to Feb. 2008, he worked at NTT DOCOMO Beijing Com-
munications Laboratories Co. Ltd as a Researcher and Research Manager. In
Feb. 2008, he joined the School of Information and Electronics Engineering,
Beijing Institute of Technology as an Associate Professor. His current research
interests include wireless and mobile communications, MIMO-OFDM, chan-
nel coding, applications of coding theory to wireless communication systems.
Tao Jiang (M’06) is currently a full Professor
in Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics,
Huazhong University of Science and Technology,
Wuhan, China. He received the B.S. and M.S. de-
grees in applied geophysics from China University
of Geosciences, Wuhan, P. R. China, in 1997 and
2000, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in informa-
tion and communication engineering from Huazhong
University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, P. R.
China, in April 2004. From Aug. 2004 to Dec. 2007, he worked in some
universities, such as Brunel University and university of Michigan in UK and
USA, respectively. He has authored or co-authored over 60 technical papers
in major journals and conferences and five books/chapters in the areas of
communications. His current research interests include the areas of wireless
communications and corresponding signal processing, especially for cognitive
wireless access, vehicular technology, OFDM, UWB and MIMO, cooperative
networks, nano networks and wireless sensor networks. He served or is
serving as symposium technical program committee membership of many
major IEEE conferences, including INFOCOM, VTC, ICC, GLOBECOM
and WCNC, etc. He is invited to serve as TPC Symposium Chair for the
International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference
2010. He is served or serving as associate editor of some technical jour-
nals in communications, including in Wiley’s Wireless Communications and
Mobile Computing (WCMC) Journal and Wiley’s International Journal of
Communication Systems, etc.
7
Shuguang Cui (S’99-M’05) received his Ph.D in
Electrical Engineering from Stanford University,
California, USA, in 2005, M.Eng in Electrical
Engineering from McMaster University, Hamilton,
Canada, in 2000, and B.Eng. in Radio Engineering
with the highest distinction from Beijing University
of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China, in
1997. He is now working as an assistant professor
in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Texas
A&M University, College Station, TX. From 1997 to 1998 he worked at
Hewlett-Packard, Beijing, P. R. China, as a system engineer. In the summer of
2003, he worked at National Semiconductor, Santa Clara, CA, on the ZigBee
project. From 2005 to 2007, he worked as an assistant professor at the depart-
ment of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Arizona, Tucson,
AZ. His current research interests include resource allocation for constrained
networks, network information theory, statistical signal processing, and gen-
eral communication theories. He was a recipient of the NSERC graduate
fellowship from the National Science and Engineering Research Council of
Canada and the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA)
graduate scholarship. He has been serving as the TPC co-chairs for the 2007
IEEE Communication Theory Workshop, the ICC08 Communication Theory
Symposium, and the GLOBECOM10 Communication Theory Symposium. He
has also been serving as the associate editors for the IEEE Communication
Letters and IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, and the elected
member for IEEE Signal Processing Society SPCOM Technical Committee.
Jianping An received the Ph.D degree from Beijing
Institute of Technology, Beijing, China in 2005. He
joined the School of Information and Electronics
Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology in 1996
where he currently is a Professor. His research
interests are in the field of Software radio, Cognitive
radio, Wireless networks and communications.
IEEE WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. XX, NO. Y, MONTH 2010 8

Qian Zhang (M’00-SM’04) received the B.S., M.S.,

and Ph.D. degrees from Wuhan University, China, in
1994, 1996, and 1999, respectively, all in computer
science. Dr. Zhang joined Hong Kong University
of Science and Technology in Sept. 2005 as an
Associate Professor. Before that, she was in Mi-
crosoft Research, Asia, Beijing, China, from July
1999, where she was the research manager of the
Wireless and Networking Group. Dr. Zhang has
published about 150 refereed papers in international leading journals and key
conferences in the areas of wireless/Internet multimedia networking, wireless
communications and networking, and overlay networking. She is the inventor
of about 30 pending patents. Her current research interests are in the areas
of wireless communications, IP networking, multimedia, P2P overlay, and
wireless security. She also participated many activities in the IETF ROHC
(Robust Header Compression) WG group for TCP/IP header compression. Dr.
Zhang is the Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communi-
cations, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular
Technologies, Computer Networks and Computer Communications. She also
served as Guest Editor for IEEE JSAC, IEEE Wireless Communications,
Computer Networks, and ACM/Springer MONET. Dr. Zhang has been in-
volved in organization committee for many important IEEE conferences,
including ICC, Globecom, WCNC, Infocom, etc. Dr. Zhang has received TR
100 (MIT Technology Review) worlds top young innovator award. She also
received the Best Asia Pacific (AP) Young Researcher Award elected by IEEE
Communication Society in year 2004. She received the Best Paper Award in
Multimedia Technical Committee (MMTC) of IEEE Communication Society
and Best Paper Award in QShine 2006. She received the Best Paper Award in
Multimedia Technical Committee (MMTC) of IEEE Communication Society
and Best Paper Award in QShine 2006. She received the Oversea Young
Investigator Award from the National Natural Science Foundation of China
(NSFC) in 2006. Dr. Zhang is the vice-chair of Multimedia Communication
Technical Committee of the IEEE Communications Society.