Wireless network coding throughput dependence on node locations

Network coding is a promising technique because of its ability to improve network throughput. In this paper we study the relation between throughput and the physical distribution of nodes in a cooperative network coding scheme, targeting to characterize favourable conditions for network coding in wireless networks. The coding scheme involves one base station and three mobile users transmitting signals cooperatively, where one of the three mobile users is selected to act as a relay node to coordinate the cooperation. The correlation between relative distances and throughput is studied by means of numerical simulations on four typical scenarios. The simulation results show that the network coding scheme can achieve gains of about 10%-30% over the traditional direct transmit scheme in terms of throughput when users are located in a suitable range. It is also shown that the network coding scheme performs better when the backhaul link has a comparable distance as the access link in the observed simulation scenarios.