Joint Network and Channel Coding for Wireless Networks

In this paper, a joint network and channel coding (JNCC) strategy with retransmissions is proposed for two canonical network elements, broadcast channel with receiver side information (BC-SI) and orthogonal multiple access channel with correlated sources (MAC-CS). By extending the derived results for BC-SI and orthogonal MAC-CS to a multi-hop wireless network with multiple sources and multiple destinations (MS-MD), we propose a complete JNCC strategy. We also quantify the network throughput by applying the renewal-reward theorem. The results show that our proposed JNCC strategy outperforms conventional separate network and channel coding (SNCC) strategy with random linear network coding (RLNC), thus proving an instance where joint coding is better than separate coding in wireless networks.