Digital and physical layer network coding performance in the context of enforced fairness

In this paper, we investigate the performance of the so-called Cross Network operating under diverse Network Coding (NC) techniques. We study the impact of Medium Access Control (MAC) layer fairness on the throughput performance of the network for the cases of pure relaying, digital NC with and without overhearing and physical layer NC with and without overhearing. We provide a comparison among these techniques and we discuss the throughput bounds, due to MAC layer limitations, imposed to the system operation by broadly adopted short range communication protocols that provide for fair resource allocation such as IEEE 802.11. Furthermore, we show that significant coding gains are achieved with digital and physical layer NC and we discuss on the energy efficiency performance of each NC case when applied on the Cross Network.