Does Network Coding Combined With Interference Cancellation Bring Any Gain to a Wireless Network?

We investigate the achievable performance gain that network coding (NC) when combined with successive interference cancellation (SIC) brings to a multihop wireless network. While SIC enables concurrent receptions from multiple transmitters, NC reduces the transmission time-slot overhead, and each of these techniques has shown independently great benefits in improving the network performance. We present a cross-layer formulation for the joint routing and scheduling problem in a wireless network with NC (with opportunistic listening) and SIC capabilities. We use the realistic signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) interference model. To solve this combinatorially complex nonlinear problem, we decompose it (using column generation) to two linear subproblems-namely opportunistic NC aware routing and scheduling subproblems. Our scheduling subproblem consists of activating noninterfering NC components, rather than links, which do not interfere with each other and will be used to route the traffic. We further extend our design to consider a multirate multihop wireless network with interference cancellation capabilities. We use numerical evaluation to present the achieved performance gain and compare our work to three other models: a base model with no NC and SIC, a model with only NC, and a model with only SIC capabilities. The numerical results show that our proposed method (both with and without variable transmission rate selection) achieves performance gains that range between moderate and significant for the various considered scenarios. Such improvements are attributed to the joint capabilities of SIC and NC in effectively controlling the interference and improving the spatial reuse.