On the viability of a cooperative-Network Coding protocol in clustered networks

The interaction between cooperation and network coding has lately received a significant deal of attention, as a combination of the two brings novelty, flexibility and improved performance. However, there is a lack of studies about real-world scenarios. In this paper, we analyze the performance of an existing cooperative-NC protocol for clustered networks, where all nodes connect in a single hop fashion to a cluster head. This is representative of environments like WLANs, mesh networks, last mile connectivity or ad hoc networks where some nodes create an infrastructure for the others. We show that our system is able to improve network throughput by as much as 15% and network capacity by 20% over decode-and-forward cooperative protocols.