Node virtualization and network coding: Optimizing data rate in wireless multicast

This paper investigates the achievable sum rate for a wireless multihop network (WMN) with unequal link capacities. We focus on a multi-source multicast scenario, where the nodes are operating in half-duplex mode. For this scenario, we propose a framework which fully utilizes the broadcast (BC) gain of the wireless medium through extended virtualization. Further, we show that our framework can switch between the routing mechanisms plain routing and network coding at the network layer (NET) and can also switch between the communication types unicast (UC), multicast (MC) and BC communications at the physical layer (PHY). We show that our framework outperforms isolated layer solutions and also currently available cross-layer approaches in the literature.