Practical Methods for Wireless Network Coding with Multiple Unicast Transmissions

We propose a simple yet effective wireless network coding and decoding technique for a multiple unicast network. It utilizes spatial diversity through cooperation between nodes which carry out distributed encoding operations dictated by generator matrices of linear block codes. In order to exemplify the technique, we make use of greedy codes over the binary field and show that the arbitrary diversity orders can be flexibly assigned to nodes. Furthermore, we present the optimal detection rule for the given model that accounts for intermediate node errors and suggest a low-complexity network decoder using the sum-product (SP) algorithm. The proposed SP detector exhibits near optimal performance. We also show asymptotic superiority of network coding over a method that utilizes the wireless channel in a repetitive manner without network coding (NC) and give related rate-diversity trade-off curves. Finally, we extend the given encoding method through selective encoding in order to obtain extra coding gains.