Network Coding meets MIMO

In this paper, MIMO techniques are applied to network coding in order to exploit the spatial diversity inherent in packet combining. This is possible because network coding and MIMO solve similar problems, namely to decode a vector of transmitted symbols given a vector of received samples. This observation leads to a new approach for NC coding/decoding. Our basic idea is to move network coding functionalities towards the physical layer in order to jointly perform NC decoding and MIMO detection and gain the advantages of the two approaches. We refer to this new strategy as MIMO_NC. Theoretical analysis and simulations prove that our system is more robust than traditional network coding to fading and packet losses.