  We propose a novel cooperative transmission scheme called "Convolutional
Network-Coded Cooperation" (CNCC) for a network including N sources, one
M-antenna relay, and one common destination. The source-relay (S-R) channels
are assumed to be Nakagami-m fading, while the source-destination (S-D) and the
relay-destination (R-D) channels are considered Rayleigh fading. The CNCC
scheme exploits the generator matrix of a good (N+M', N, v) systematic
convolutional code, with the free distance of d_free designed over GF(2), as
the network coding matrix which is run by the network's nodes, such that the
systematic symbols are directly transmitted from the sources, and the parity
symbols are sent by the best antenna of the relay. An upper bound on the BER of
the sources, and consequently, the achieved diversity orders are obtained. The
numerical results indicate that the CNCC scheme outperforms the other
cooperative schemes considered, in terms of the diversity order and the network
throughput. The simulation results confirm the accuracy of the theoretical
analysis.
