Cooperative Communication Using Network Coding

TL;DR

This paper analyzes cooperative communication in a cognitive radio network using network coding, demonstrating that adaptive network coding improves throughput over static schemes through analytical modeling of retransmission attempts.

Contribution

It introduces and compares static and adaptive network coding schemes in a cognitive radio context, providing analytical insights into their performance and demonstrating the superiority of the adaptive approach.

Findings

Adaptive network coding outperforms static schemes in throughput.

Analytical models for transmission attempts are developed and validated.

The adaptive scheme is effective under both fixed and truncated frame sizes.

Abstract

We consider a cognitive radio network scenario where a primary transmitter and a secondary transmitter, respectively, communicate a message to their respective primary receiver and secondary receiver over a packet-based wireless link, using a joint automatic-repeat-request (ARQ) error control scheme. The secondary transmitter assists in the retransmission of the primary message, which improves the primary performance, and is granted limited access to the transmission resources. Conventional ARQ, as well as two network-coding schemes are investigated for application in the retransmission phase; namely the static network-coding (SNC) scheme and the adaptive network-coding (ANC) scheme. For each scheme we analyze the transmission process by investigating the distribution of the number of transmission attempts and approximate it by normal distributions. Considering both the cases of an adaptive frame size and a truncated frame size, we derive analytical results on packet throughput and infer that the ANC scheme outperforms the SNC scheme.