A Network-Coding Aided Road-Map of Large-Scale Near-Capacity Cooperative Communications.

In the paper, we present a road-map towards a near-capacity large-scale multi-user cooperative-communications (NLMC) system, where all the evolution paths converge to the construction of the NLMC system. More specifically, we will summarize all relevant schemes appearing on the road-map in the unified frame-work of forward error correction. various network coding design paradigms are highlighted for illustrating how the NLMC systems might be designed for meeting diverse design criteria in the context of cooperative and cognitive communications, where the channel capacity of the NLMC systems is used for comparing the different design paradigms.