AbstractCooperative diversity is an innovative approach to improve the reliability of communication. Although this technique is considered in the next‐generation mobile communication standards, it has its own challenges in practice. For example, in simultaneous transmission‐based cooperative protocols, perfect synchronisation of nodes is very hard to realise. The traditional time division multiple access method can simplify the synchronisation problems but leads to long transmission delays. In this paper, a low‐delay cooperative strategy is proposed for a network with multiple sources and a single destination, which requires only a simple type of synchronisation. In this technique, we use a combination of superposition coding and network coding; hence the name superposition network coded cooperation. For this strategy, good bounds are obtained for the probability of correct detection for general M‐PSK and M‐QAM modulation and are compared with simulation results. The results demonstrate improvement in error performance compared with other transmission schemes requiring the same transmission time as superposition network coded cooperation. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.