Effect of the number of clusters on the performance of Cooperative Network Coding

Cooperative Network Coding synergistically integrates cluster-based Cooperative Communications and Network Coding to provide high performance by decreasing the outage probability and increasing the network reliability. In this paper, we investigate the effect of the number of hops on the performance of Cooperative Network Coding and analyze different scenarios. Cooperative Network Coding provides a constant throughput when the connectivity (cooperation among the nodes) r is at least 8, and is not sensitive to the probability of transmission loss of a link. When the connectivity r is 4, Cooperative Network Coding maintains the same constant property for the throughput for a number of node per cluster greater or equal than 12 and 14 when the probability of transmission loss of a link 0.1 and 0.25, respectively. Generally, in contrast to multihop ad-hoc networks, where the probability of successful reception exponentially decreases with the number of hops, we demonstrate that Cooperative Network Coding is relatively insensitive to throughput degradation due to the increasing of number of hops.