Systematic wireless network coding

Abstract

We present a systematic network coding strategy for cooperative communication, in which some nodes may replicate-and-forward packets in addition to sending random linear combinations of the packets. We argue that if this strategy is used only at certain nodes in the network, the throughput will not be reduced relative to random linear network coding. Furthermore, if packets can traverse the entire network in their systematic (uncoded) form, per-packet delay can be reduced, decoding complexity can be reduced, and the potential to recover packets from incomplete coded blocks will be improved. We describe this approach and provide an analysis of the packet loss rate for fixed-rate coding on a multihop path.