Practical Implementation of Cloud Initialization Procedure for Wireless Physical Layer Network Coding Clouds

A relay in a network without any centralized controlling entity is subject to a lack of global network state knowledge. The only information that it can gain comes from its closest neighbors. This is the typical situation in wireless multi-node networks with many sources, destinations and relays. Our proposal assumes such a network that we call a cloud since it provides a service, reliable communication, to the network users - sources and destinations. The service is provided via a uniform interface and the users should not be involved or even interested in the internal cloud organization. This allows the user nodes to behave more or less selfishly. All of the tasks associated with service providing are delegated to the cloud and are solved by a distributed approach, as much as possible, without any controlling node. A technique known as Wireless Physical Layer Network Coding (WPLNC) is a potential enabling technology for such networks. In this paper a Software Defined Radio (SDR) implementation based on an OFDM physical layer of one of the algorithms that equips each network node with all the information necessary to start the WPLNC communication is presented.