Software defined radio implementation of a two-way relay network with digital network coding

Network coding is a technology which has the potential to increase network throughput beyond existing standards based on routing. Despite the fact, that the theoretical understanding is mature, there have been only a few papers on implementation of network coding and demonstration of a working testbed. This paper presents the implementation of a two-way relay network with digital network coding. Unlike previous work, where the testbeds are implemented on custom hardware, we implement the testbed on GNU Radio, an open-source software defined radio platform. In this paper we discuss the implementation issues and the ways to overcome the hardware imperfections and software inadequacies of the GNU Radio platform. Using our testbed we measure the throughput of the system in an indoor environment. The experimental results show that the network coding outperforms the traditional routing as predicted by the theoretical analysis.