Cooperative Diverse Opportunistic Network Coding for Wireless Networks

Abstract

Opportunistic network coding (ONC) increases communication networks’ throughput by XORing two or more packets together. However, it has shown that ONC deteriorates in terms of bit error rate (BER) and throughput when deployed in noisy wireless networks. Therefore, we propose a mechanism that combines ONC, diversity coding, and cooperation to mitigate the shortcomings of ONC. Additionally, to reduce delay and error propagation at relay nodes, we limit the maximum number of packets that can be network-coded together to three and only encode packets received directly by relay nodes. Moreover, we study the effect of link outages/mobility and show how to mitigate at least one link failure. Finally, we show that our system alleviates the issues previously mentioned and provides better performance to direct transmission and ONC when implemented in noisy networks using simulations.