Natural Network Coding in Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

Cooperative communication has been intensively studied in recent years. In cooperative communication, cooperative users are grouped into clusters to form virtual MIMO channels. However, existing work mainly aims at achieving diversity gain, while generally overlooks the spatial multiplexing property of MIMO channels. In this paper, we address spatial multiplexing by introducing natural network coding protocol (NNC). In a user cooperative scenario, NNC takes advantage of the natural randomness of wireless channels. Simulation experiments show that NNC greatly reduces bit error probability and achieves about 70% throughput gain over time sharing transmission protocols.