Joint Cooperative MAC and Network Coding for Two-way Relaying Networks

This paper studies a three-hop two-way relaying network, in which two end nodes exchange their information data via two relays. In literature, it usually assumes that each link of the two-way relaying network is error-free. Under this assumption, if considering scheduling and network coding (NC), one only needs three time slots to exchange a pair of messages, obtaining throughput 2/3 messages/time slot. This paper shows that when each link is not zero, the throughput of NC decreases with the increasing of FER. To improve the throughput of the NC scheme, this paper integrates the technology of cooperative MAC to propose a new scheme, namely joint cooperative MAC and NC (JCNC) scheme. Simulation and analytical results demonstrate that the proposed JCNC scheme overperforms the NC scheme. An appealing observation is that each relay node only needs four cooperative nodes to fully gain the advantage of JCNC against NC.