  In this paper, we investigate the impact of network coding at the relay node
on the stable throughput rate in multicasting cooperative wireless networks.
The proposed protocol adopts Network-level cooperation in contrast to the
traditional physical layer cooperative protocols and in addition uses random
linear network coding at the relay node. The traffic is assumed to be bursty
and the relay node forwards its packets during the periods of source silence
which allows better utilization for channel resources. Our results show that
cooperation will lead to higher stable throughput rates than conventional
retransmission policies and that the use of random linear network coding at the
relay can further increase the stable throughput with increasing Network Coding
field size or number of packets over which encoding is performed.
