Scalable ad hoc networks for arbitrary-cast: Practical broadcast-relay transmission strategy leveraging physical-layer network coding

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.