On the Use of Cooperative Physical Layer Network Coding for Energy Efficient Routing

In this paper, we focus on energy efficient routing in wireless ad hoc networks. We exploit modulo combining of continuous-time signals arriving at a receiving node from a number of synchronized transmitting nodes and introduce a cooperative physical layer network coding (CPLNC) scheme. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in reducing energy consumption, we propose two routing algorithms that utilize CPLNC as a basic building block. Through analysis, we show that with sufficiently long packets, the proposed algorithms can achieve energy saving gains of up to 37% and 62% with respect to the conventional shortest-path routing algorithm in regular line and grid networks, respectively, using less number of hops. We incorporate CPLNC into two major energy efficient routing algorithms and derive threshold distances that enable the current node to intelligently decide whether it should use CPLNC or point to point transmission to the next hop. Simulation results confirm that the proposed and the modified algorithms based on CPLNC outperform their conventional counterparts in terms of achieving significant energy saving gains in networks of randomly distributed nodes.