This article is part of the series Theory and Applications in Multiuser/Multiterminal Communications.

Open Access Research Article

Scalable Ad Hoc Networks for Arbitrary-Cast: Practical Broadcast-Relay Transmission Strategy Leveraging Physical-Layer Network Coding

Chen Chen1*, Kai Cai2 and Haige Xiang1

Author Affiliations

1 School of Electroncis Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China

2 Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China

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EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking 2008, 2008:621703 doi:10.1155/2008/621703


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://jwcn.eurasipjournals.com/content/2008/1/621703


Received:1 August 2007
Revisions received:15 November 2007
Accepted:25 February 2008
Published:9 March 2008

© 2008 The Author(s).

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The capacity of wireless ad hoc networks is constrained by the interference of concurrent transmissions among nodes. Instead of only trying to avoid the interference, physical-layer network coding (PNC) is a new approach that embraces the interference initiatively. We employ a network form of interference cancellation, with the PNC approach, and propose the multihop, broadcast-relay transmission strategy in linear, rectangular, and hexagonal networks. The theoretical analysis shows that it gains the transmission efficiency by the factors of 2.5 for the rectangular networks and 2 for the hexagonal networks. We also propose a practical signal recovery algorithm in the physical layer to deal with the influence of multipath fading channels and time synchronization errors, as well as to use media access control (MAC) protocols that support the simultaneous receptions. This transmission strategy obtains the same efficiency from one-to-one communication to one-to-many. By our approach, the number of the users/terminals of the network has better scalability, and the overall network throughput is improved.

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