With the increasing demand of reliable communications
on move, cooperative communications has proved to be
an efficient solution to reduce the effects of unreliable nature of
wireless channel. In this paper, we study the Space-Time (ST)
cooperative communications aided by a fixed relay, forwarding
network coded bits to the destination. We present the performance
analysis in terms of outage probability. With analytical
results, we show that the investigated scheme outperforms the
cooperative transmission based on ST codes only. To be specific,
the analytical results show that ST codes with the help of
dedicated relay forwarding network coding can achieve diversity
order of 3 while ST codes based cooperative communications,
without use of network coding, only offers diversity order of 2.
