A Network Coding Unicast Strategy for Wireless Multi-Hop Networks

In wireless multi-hop networks such as ad-hoc and sensor networks, one node may receive signals from several other nodes simultaneously due to the broadcast nature of the wireless medium. That results in the reduction of bandwidth usage and system efficiency. To deal with this problem, several approaches have been developed to avoid signal collision by appropriate protocols. In this work and in contrast to previous works, we put forward a unicast strategy that can recover the desired signal from the collided signals in wireless multi-hop networks. The proposed strategy is featured as a physical layer network coding scheme that can greatly increase the throughput of unicast in wireless multi-hop networks without synchronization nor power control among the different transmitters, thus, making it ideally fit for distributed networks.