Phoenix: Making Cooperation More Efficient through Network Coding in Wireless Networks

This paper introduces a novel MAC protocol for wireless networks, called Phoenix, that employs ideas from network coding to enhance decode and forward cooperation. A relay is allowed to code data of its own together with a corrupted packet during a retransmission at no additional cost in bandwidth. Therefore, while in conventional cooperative protocols a node becomes a relay only to assist other terminals, with our proposal a cooperator can also serve its own traffic. We evaluate Phoenix's performance by means of a theoretical model and extensive simulation campaigns. We show that Phoenix is especially beneficial in multihop settings and interesting gains over benchmark protocols can be achieved.