Phoenix: A Hybrid Cooperative-Network Coding Protocol for Fast Failure Recovery in Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper, we investigate how to apply MIMO_NC in order to increase the efficiency of cooperative communications. MIMO_NC is a recent strategy to combine, in an integrated system, MIMO detection techniques and network coding. MIMO_NC is robust to channel errors, as it can exploit the spatial diversity provided by multiple transmissions of the same information, and throughput effective as it is based on network coding. In this paper we design a cooperative MAC protocol based on MIMO_NC which can outperform classical cooperative schemes. We also prove its effectiveness by means of analytical modelling and simulations in different network configurations.