AbstractIn this paper, we propose a scheme to improve the performance of turbo‐coded two‐user cooperative uplink transmission. In the proposed scheme, each user transmits its partner's second parity frame in addition to its own, using a network‐coded combination, which is further protected by a space‐time block code. The proposed system is simulated in slow and fast fading environments. Numerical simulation results indicate that for slow fading, the proposed scheme can yield up to 20% increase in data throughput compared to the traditional distributed turbo coding, while simultaneously providing a gain of 0.7 dB in bit error rate. This latter gain rises to approximately 2.5 dB when a fast fading environment is considered. Furthermore, an outage probability analysis is conducted, which corroborates the simulated performance results.Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.