Cooperative Network Coding for Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks

In wireless ad-hoc networks, a major challenge is how to provide robust and efficient communication. To achieve this goal, cooperative communication and network coding have been proven to be effective. In the literature, most existing studies focus on the performance of the two schemes separately. In our study, we will investigate the performance of system that combines them tightly together. In particular, we will propose a unified two-way traffic model that can characterize the features of both of them. Based on this model, we develop a new cooperative network coding scheme to further improve the system throughput. Both decode-and-forward and amplify-and-forward techniques are discussed for the two-way traffic model. Numerical results show that the new scheme can significantly improve the performance over traditional schemes.