Information Exchange in Wireless Networks with Network Coding and Physical-layer Broadcast

TLDR: It is shown that mutual exchange of independent information between two nodes in a wireless network can be performed by exploiting network coding and the physical-layer broadcast property offered by the wireless medium.

Abstract: —We show that mutual exchange of independentinformation between two nodes in a wireless network can be effi-ciently performed by exploiting network coding and the physical-layer broadcast property offered by the wireless medium. Theproposed approach improves upon conventional solutions thatseparate the processing of the two unicast sessions, correspondingto information transfer along one direction and the oppositedirection. We propose a distributed scheme that obviates theneed for synchronization and is robust to random packet lossand delay, and so on. The scheme is simple and incurs minoroverhead. I. I NTRODUCTION In this paper, we investigate the mutual exchange of inde-pendent information between two nodes in a wireless network.Let us name the two nodes in consideration a and b, respec-tively. Consider a packet-based communication network withall packets of equal size. The basic problem is very simple: awants to transmit a sequence of packets {X 1 (n)} to b andb wants to transmit a sequence of packets {X