The surge in traffic has amplified the need for greater reliability and higher throughput in vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. While network-coded cooperation (NCC) offers a promising solution, its reliance on overheard signals and susceptibility to network coding noise raise concerns about the quality-of-service (QoS) being provided. To address this, we propose a rate-splitting aided multi-user cooperation (RSMUC) framework, which employs rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) as a relaying scheme and enhances the QoS by removing the dependency on overheard signals while leveraging the inherent benefits of RSMA. The outage probability analysis of the system is performed, where joint cumulative distribution functions (CDFs) are essential for accurately characterizing the outage performance of both common and private streams. To model the interdependence between these streams, we develop a copula-based framework. The results show close alignment between the simulated results and the derived analytical equations. Comparative evaluations against benchmark schemes, like NCC variants and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) based cooperative systems (NCS), show that RSMUC significantly outperforms existing approaches across various performance metrics like outage probability and throughput. The contribution of RSMA was further verified through comparisons of throughput and packet delivery/drop (%) rates, providing key insights that are crucial in setting vehicular cluster sizes. These findings underscore the potential of RSMUC to enhance reliability and deliver improved QoS in next-generation V2V networks.

Driven by the growing demands for reliability and high data rates, uplink rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) has emerged as a promising technique for next-generation wireless networks. However, in practical scenarios, particularly under imperfect SIC (ipSIC), the presence of residual interference (RI) significantly degrades performance, especially at high transmit power levels. This RI stems from two key sources: intra-user split packet interference (SPI) due to imperfect cancellation of a user’s own split streams, and inter-user residual packet interference (IPI) from imperfect cancellation of other users’ signals. As these impairments accumulate across multiple SIC stages, the inherent benefits of rate splitting may progressively diminish, potentially resulting in performance degradation compared to conventional schemes such as non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). To address this challenge, we propose a split-packet interference management (SPIM) framework that enhances uplink RSMA performance under ipSIC by structurally enforcing orthogonality between a user’s own split streams. This design reduces the reliance on successive decoding and effectively limits the propagation of RI, especially from SPI, while preserving the benefits of rate-splitting. We consider a two-user system and perform a comprehensive outage probability analysis under both perfect SIC (pSIC) and ipSIC conditions, leveraging a copula-based statistical modelling framework to accurately model the dependency between streams. Additionally, we derive analytical expressions for the ergodic sum rate thus, providing insights into the long-term performance. While the core analysis focuses on a two-user setup, the SPIM RSMA architecture is extended to larger user groups with a scalable receiver design. Simulation results closely match analytical findings and demonstrate that while SPIM RSMA performs comparably to conventional RSMA under pSIC, it significantly outperforms both conventional RSMA and NOMA under ipSIC conditions in terms of outage probability, sum-rate, and sum-throughput. These results underscore the structural versatility of SPIM RSMA, which proactively mitigates SPI, thereby preserving the advantages of rate splitting in SIC-constrained environments.

This paper presents a peer conscious opportunistic network coded cooperation (PC-O-NCC) system that exploits multi-user diversity (MUD) gain in a simple network coded cooperation (NCC) based network. It prioritizes sources with better channel conditions by granting them earlier access than the other competing nodes unlike the prevalent time division multiple access (TDMA) technique used widely in any NCC network. This improves the outage performance of the overall system. To prioritise sources with better channel conditions, a novel timer-based MAC protocol is proposed. The proposed protocol is designed such that it aims to reduce collisions by taking the network load into account along with channel conditions while generating the timer values. It also minimizes the power consumption in performing clear channel assessment (CCA) by sources which is a costly affair for battery-operated devices. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm improves the outage performance while keeping the latency to a minimum value. The improvement in the outage performance can prove to be important in taking key decisions which becomes crucial in disaster management, drone assisted scenarios or intelligent transportation systems.