Network Product Coding

Network coding is a useful tool to increase the multicast capacity of networks. The traditional approach to network coding involving XOR operation has several limitations such as low robustness and can support only two users/packets at a time, per relay, in the mixing process to achieve optimal error performance. We propose the employment of product coding at the relay station instead of XOR and investigate such a system where we use the relay to generate product codes by combining packets from different users. Our scheme uses relays to transmit only the redundancy of the product code instead of the whole product code. We seek to employ product coding can be able to support more than two users/packets per relay per slot, while maintaining a good error performance. Our scheme can accommodate as many users per relay as the constituent block code allows, thus reducing the number of relays required in the network. Product codes also offer increased robustness and flexibility as well as several other advantages, such as proper structure for burst error correction without extra interleaving. We compare the performance of such a scheme to the conventional XOR scheme and see that our scheme not only reduces the number of relays required but gives improved error performance as well as. Another encouraging result is that our scheme starts to significantly outperform the conventional one by introducing a gain at the relay.