Network Coding and Relay Selection for a Bidirectional Ship-to-Ship Relay Communication System

This letter considers a ship-to-ship communication system in which two ships exchange their information with the help of multiple relay ships. For the system, we propose a novel relay scheme that allows relay ships to select a method between analog network coding (ANC) and digital network coding (DNC) adaptively based on channel state information. We also provide a relay selection criterion in supporting the proposed adaptive network coding. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional scheme employing only the ANC or only the DNC.