On Combining Distributed Joint Source-Channel-Network Coding and Turbo Equalization in Multiple Access Relay Networks

We consider a multiple access relay channel where two sources S1 and S2 send their data to a common destination node aided by a shared relay node. In this paper we ex- tend previous work on this topic by assuming that the out- put of both information sources are correlated with mem- ory. Furthermore, we consider frequency-selective fading channels, which introduce inter-symbol interference among the transmitted symbols. In this context, we propose an it- erative receiver which comprises Turbo Maximum a Pos- teriori (MAP) equalization and distributed source-channel- network decoding in an iterative fashion. Various relaying strategies such as network coding or time multiplexing are analyzed in detail. In addition, a suboptimal but less com- plex Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) linear equalizer is also utilized to account for communication scenarios with constrained complexity. Simulation results show that net- work coding based strategy outperforms, in all cases, the other considered forwarding schemes.