A Practical Joint Network-Channel Coding Scheme for Reliable Communication in Wireless Networks

In this paper, we propose a practical scheme, Non-Binary Joint Network-Channel Coding (NB-JNCC), for reliable multi-path multi-hop communication in arbitrary large-scale wireless networks. NB-JNCC seamlessly couples channel coding and network coding to effectively combat the detrimental effect of fading of wireless channels. Specifically, NB-JNCC combines non-binary irregular low-density parity-check (LDPC) channel coding and random linear network coding through iterative joint decoding, which helps to fully exploit the spatial diversity and redundancy residing in both channel codes and network codes. In addition, since it operates over a high order Galois field, NB-JNCC can be directly combined with high order modulation without the need of any bit-to-symbol conversion nor its inverse. Through both analysis and simulation, we demonstrate the significant performance improvement of NB-JNCC over other schemes.