A Physical Layer Aspect of Network Coding with Statistically Independent Noisy Channels

We investigate the physical layer bit error probability (BEP) of a network using network coding (coded network). The network consists of statistically independent noisy channels. Thus, transmitted bits are subject to the noise disturbance. An error marking algorithm is given to calculate the error weight (the number of erroneous bits) in the sinks. Then we can calculate the sink BEP of a coded network from the channel BEPs. We formulate the minimizing BEP problem. We show that coding schemes with the same flow may have different sink BEPs. Two approaches are suggested to reduce the complexity.