A generalized adaptive network coding (GANC) scheme is conceived for a multi-user, multi-relay scenario, where the multiple users transmit independent information streams to a common destination with the aid of multiple relays. The proposed GANC scheme is developed from adaptive network coded cooperation (ANCC), which aims for a high flexibility in order to: 1) allow arbitrary channel coding schemes to serve as the crosslayer network coding regime; 2) provide any arbitrary trade-off between the

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... throughput and reliability by adjusting the ratio of the source nodes and the cooperating relay nodes. Furthermore, we incorporate the proposed GANC scheme in a novel successive relaying aided network (SRAN) in order to recover the typical 50% half-duplex relaying-induced throughput loss. However, in support of the coherent detection, in addition to carrying out all the relaying functions, the relays have to estimate the Sourceto-Relay channels, which imposes a substantial extra energy consumption and bit rate reduction owing to the inclusion of pilots. Hence noncoherent detection is employed for eliminating the power-hungry channel estimation. Finally, we intrinsically amalgamate our GANC scheme with the joint network-channel coding (JNCC) concept into a powerful three-stage concatenated architecture relying on iterative detection, which is specifically designed for the destination node (DN). The proposed scheme is also capable of adapting to rapidly time-varying network topologies, while relying on energy-efficient detection.