Noisy Network Coding

A noisy network coding scheme for sending multiple sources over a general noisy network is presented. For multi-source multicast networks, the scheme naturally extends both network coding over noiseless networks by Ahlswede, Cai, Li, and Yeung, and compress-forward coding for the relay channel by Cover and El Gamal to general discrete memoryless and Gaussian networks. The scheme also recovers as special cases the results on coding for wireless relay networks and deterministic networks by Avestimehr, Diggavi, and Tse, and coding for wireless erasure networks by Dana, Gowaikar, Palanki, Hassibi, and Effros. The scheme involves message repetition coding, relay signal compression, and simultaneous decoding. Unlike previous compress--forward schemes, where independent messages are sent over multiple blocks, the same message is sent multiple times using independent codebooks as in the network coding scheme for cyclic networks. Furthermore, the relays do not use Wyner--Ziv binning as in previous compress-forward schemes, and each decoder performs simultaneous joint typicality decoding on the received signals from all the blocks without explicitly decoding the compression indices. A consequence of this new scheme is that achievability is proved simply and more generally without resorting to time expansion to extend results for acyclic networks to networks with cycles. The noisy network coding scheme is then extended to general multi-source networks by combining it with decoding techniques for interference channels. For the Gaussian multicast network, noisy network coding improves the previously established gap to the cutset bound. We also demonstrate through two popular AWGN network examples that noisy network coding can outperform conventional compress-forward, amplify-forward, and hash-forward schemes.Comment: 33 pages, 4 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Practical Network Coding in Sensor Networks: Quo Vadis?

Abstract. Network coding is a novel concept for improving network ca-pacity. This additional capacity may be used to increase throughput or reliability. Also in wireless networks, network coding has been proposed as a method for improving communication. We present our experience from two studies of applying network coding in realistic wireless sen-sor networks scenarios. As we show, network coding is not as useful in practical deployments as earlier theoretical work suggested. We discuss limitations and future opportunities for network coding in sensor net-works. 1 Network Coding in Wireless Sensor Networks Network Coding was introduced by Ahlswede et al. [1], proving that it can in-crease multicast capacity. Since then, it has been investigated in several different networked scenarios which demand different traffic characteristics. Most previous research has focused on theoretical aspects of applying network coding to sensor networks. There are, however, also more practical examples of applying networ

An Extended Network Coding Opportunity Discovery Scheme in Wireless Networks

Network coding is known as a promising approach to improve wireless network performance. How to discover the coding opportunity in relay nodes is really important for it. There are more coding chances, there are more times it can improve network throughput by network coding operation. In this paper, an extended network coding opportunity discovery scheme (ExCODE) is proposed, which is realized by appending the current node ID and all its 1-hop neighbors' IDs to the packet. ExCODE enables the next hop relay node to know which nodes else have already overheard the packet, so it can discover the potential coding opportunities as much as possible. ExCODE expands the region of discovering coding chance to n-hops, and have more opportunities to execute network coding operation in each relay node. At last, we implement ExCODE over the AODV protocol, and efficiency of the proposed mechanism is demonstrated with NS2 simulations, compared to the existing coding opportunity discovery scheme.Comment: 15 pages and 7 figure

Wireless Broadcast with Network Coding in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks: DRAGONCAST

Network coding is a recently proposed method for transmitting data, which has been shown to have potential to improve wireless network performance. We study network coding for one specific case of multicast, broadcasting, from one source to all nodes of the network. We use network coding as a loss tolerant, energy-efficient, method for broadcast. Our emphasis is on mobile networks. Our contribution is the proposal of DRAGONCAST, a protocol to perform network coding in such a dynamically evolving environment. It is based on three building blocks: a method to permit real-time decoding of network coding, a method to adjust the network coding transmission rates, and a method for ensuring the termination of the broadcast. The performance and behavior of the method are explored experimentally by simulations; they illustrate the excellent performance of the protocol