Time and power scheduling in an ad hoc network with bidirectional relaying and network coding
Maryam Mohseni, Dongmei Zhao · Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing · 2013
Network coding NC is a technique that allows intermediate nodes to combine the received packets from multiple links and forwarded to subsequent nodes. Compared with pure relaying, using NC in a wireless network, one can potentially improve the network throughput, but it increases the complexity of resource allocations as the quality of one transmission is often affected by the transmission conditions of multiple links. In this paper, we consider an ad hoc network, where all the links have bidirectional communications, and a relay node forwards traffic between the source and the destination nodes using NC. All transmissions share the same frequency channel, and simultaneous transmissions cause interference to each other. We consider both digital NC and analog NC strategies, referred to as DNC and ANC, respectively, and schedule transmission time and power of the nodes in order to maximize the overall network throughput. For DNC, an optimum scheduling is formulated and solved by assuming that a central controller is available to collect all the link gain information and make the scheduling decisions. Distributed scheduling schemes are proposed for networks using DNC and ANC. Our results indicate that the proposed scheduling scheme for DNC achieves higher throughput than pure relaying, and the scheduling scheme for ANC can achieve higher throughput than both DNC and pure relaying under certain conditions. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.