Deterministic network coding over Long Term Evaluation Advance communication system

In this paper, we propose and investigate a simple, low-complexity and deterministic cooperative protocol that exploits Network Coding (NC) within a wireless network. The scenario under investigation is for Long Term Evaluation Advanced (LTE-A) downlink communication system network, where a source of data sends k stream of packets to a Pico relay which forwards them to two Femto relays via fiber optic link and to the destination via lossy wireless channels. The Femto relays forward the received k packets to the destination (downlink scenario) through two lossy wireless channels after applying NC over them. The proposed scenario applies NC in deterministic way over the data link layer, specifically, over the MAC sub-layer with taking the advantages of Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) and Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) applications. Simulation results showed good improvement obtained when NC is applied in term of packet error probability and transmission data rate over the MAC layer. Moreover, it showed how significantly ARQ needed is improved when cooperative NC is implemented.