Comparison of Network Coding and Non-Network Coding Schemes for Multi-hop Wireless Networks

Network coding has been shown to be useful for throughput and reliability in various network topologies, under a fixed-rate, point-to-multipoint wireless network model. We study the effect of introducing a wireless network model where link capacity depends on the network geometry and the signal to interference and noise ratio. In particular, we compare strategies with and without network coding on a multicast network with and without fading, and on single-user multiple path networks with fading. For the multicast network without fading, we find that the network geometry affects which scheme attains higher throughput. For the case with fading, we compare the throughput-outage probability curves achieved by network coding and repetition schemes. For the multiple path networks, we further consider the case where multiple simultaneous transmissions of identical information signals can be combined at a receiver. We find that the relative performance of the schemes we consider depends on the network geometry, the ratio of signal to noise power, whether multiple simultaneous transmissions can be combined, and the operating point on the throughput-outage probability curve

A cross layer multi hop network architecture for wireless Ad Hoc networks

In this paper, a novel decentralized cross-layer multi-hop cooperative network architecture is presented. Our architecture involves the design of a simple yet efficient cooperative flooding scheme,two decentralized opportunistic cooperative forwarding mechanisms as well as the design of Routing Enabled Cooperative Medium Access Control (RECOMAC) protocol that spans and incorporates the physical, medium access control (MAC) and routing layers for improving the performance of multihop communication. The proposed architecture exploits randomized coding at the physical layer to realize cooperative diversity. Randomized coding alleviates relay selection and actuation mechanisms,and therefore reduces the coordination among the relays. The coded packets are forwarded via opportunistically formed cooperative sets within a region, without communication among the relays and without establishing a prior route. In our architecture, routing layer functionality is submerged into the MAC layer to provide seamless cooperative communication while the messaging overhead to set up routes, select and actuate relays is minimized. RECOMAC is shown to provide dramatic performance improvements, such as eight times higher throughput and ten times lower end-to-end delay as well as reduced overhead, as compared to networks based on well-known IEEE 802.11 and Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocols

Diversity, Coding, and Multiplexing Trade-Off of Network-Coded Cooperative Wireless Networks

In this paper, we study the performance of network-coded cooperative diversity systems with practical communication constraints. More specifically, we investigate the interplay between diversity, coding, and multiplexing gain when the relay nodes do not act as dedicated repeaters, which only forward data packets transmitted by the sources, but they attempt to pursue their own interest by forwarding packets which contain a network-coded version of received and their own data. We provide a very accurate analysis of the Average Bit Error Probability (ABEP) for two network topologies with three and four nodes, when practical communication constraints, i.e., erroneous decoding at the relays and fading over all the wireless links, are taken into account. Furthermore, diversity and coding gain are studied, and advantages and disadvantages of cooperation and binary Network Coding (NC) are highlighted. Our results show that the throughput increase introduced by NC is offset by a loss of diversity and coding gain. It is shown that there is neither a coding nor a diversity gain for the source node when the relays forward a network-coded version of received and their own data. Compared to other results available in the literature, the conclusion is that binary NC seems to be more useful when the relay nodes act only on behalf of the source nodes, and do not mix their own packets to the received ones. Analytical derivation and findings are substantiated through extensive Monte Carlo simulations.Comment: IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), 2012. Accepted for publication and oral presentatio