Experimental Performance Analysis of Network Coding in Wireless Systems
Shahzaib Qazi, Syed Muhammad Zain Zafar, Salman Atif, Syed Ali Hassan, Dushantha Nalin K. Jayakody · 2018
Network coding (NC) holds great significance in the upcoming 5G paradigm because of the potential improvements it offers in terms of network throughput, energy efficiency and data security. However, the evidence for these potential advantages comes mainly from within a theoretical framework or is based on simulations; there is a paucity of empirical evidence. Secondly, few works have evaluated NC in terms of its impacts on both throughput and bit error rate (BER) simultaneously. The work outlined in this paper addresses both of the aforementioned issues. We implement both the NC and non-NC schemes for a communication system in the context of n-source multiple-input single- output (MISO) topologies on software-defined radios (SDRs). The performances of the two schemes have been compared in terms of BER, throughput and goodput or useful throughput. Our results show that the goodput improvement in NC when compared to non-NC is more pronounced at higher transmitter (TX) gains and that below a certain TX gain threshold, non-NC should be preferred over NC.