Wireless network coding in multi-cell networks: Analysis and performance

Network coding has recently attracted a lot of interest from the research community, mainly due to its simplicity of application and the large number of applications it can be suited for. Research in network coding started on wired networks, but the researchers soon came to realize that the inherent properties of the wireless medium render it a fertile ground for the application of network coding, and the resulting efforts mainly targeted bidirectional traffic scenarios. In this work, we focus on practical implementation issues for network coding when applied to uplink cellular traffic. We provide our own relaying scheme based on decode-and-forward relays and network coding, with a specially designed method of decoding at the receiver. We complement this method with user grouping in order to make better use of the application of network coding. We measure the SINR and capacity performances of our proposed scheme and compare them to the classical decode-and-forward algorithm in a system level simulator. We show that user grouping should complement a network coding solution in order to translate the decrease in the number of transmissions offered by network coding into capacity gains.