Analysis of Network Coding in Cooperative Wireless Multi-Hop Networks

Abstract

We investigate the performance of two multi-hop network topologies in which multiple sources have independent information to be transmitted to a far off common destination. Linear Network coding technique is used by relays to transmit the combined information of multiple sources. The first topology contains nodes that are placed in a regular pattern and divide this deterministic topology in two categories of distributed and co-located. These topologies are modeled with a quasi-stationary Markov chain. The relay nodes use decode and forward (DF) mechanism at each hop. We find the transition probability matrix of the Markov chain assuming that all the nodes have same transmit power and the channel is Rayleigh fading. The second random network topology has fixed number of nodes that are randomly placed in a strip-shaped network. The outage probabilitiy of each node is found and the state distribution at each hop is used to analyze the network coverage for a given signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) margin. Theoretical results have been included that match with the simulation results.