Simple Relay Selection for Wireless Network Coding System

Broadcasting nature of wireless communications makes it possible to apply opportunistic network coding (OPNC) by overhearing transmitted packets from a source to sink nodes. However, it is difficult to apply network coding to the topology of multiple relay and sink nodes. We propose to use relay node selection, which finds a proper node for network coding since the OPNC alone in the topology of multiple relays and sink nodes cannot guarantee network coding gain. The proposed system is a novel combination of wireless network coding and relay selection, which is a key contribution of this paper. In this paper, with the consideration of channel state and potential network coding gain, we propose relay node selection techniques, and show performance gain over the conventional OPNC and a channel-based selection algorithm in terms of average system throughput.