Review
A survey and tutorial of wireless relay network protocols based on network coding

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2012.12.018Get rights and content

Abstract

Ever since the wireless relay network (RN) was introduced, it has led to the discovery of several new protocols, which have been consistently improved by researchers to overcome many constraints such as throughput, capacity bound, symbol error rate, outage probability, and power allocations. Meanwhile, network coding (NC) was invented as an efficient technique to address these problems. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no comprehensive discussion about wireless-RN modes in the literature. We therefore provide a tutorial concerning the basic concepts of NC, dealing with the classification of particular relay modes, and presenting new wireless-RN protocols with/without NC in this paper. Under appropriate categories (i.e., fixed and dynamic), much attention has been given to various proposed wireless-RN protocols because they may differ individually depending on their processing at relay nodes and network topology. We compare the available wireless-RN protocols with/without NC, and conclude that the wireless-RN based on NC outperforms the traditional wireless-RN in certain scenarios.

Introduction

Cooperative communication is a specific area of wireless communication that has been extensively explored within the last decade. The concept of cooperative communications (relay network (RN)) builds upon a network architecture where nodes help each other to realize spatial advantages of diversity. In traditional networks, the data packets directly transmit between any two end users. Due to a number of factors such as the transmission range, natural obstacles, or poor quality of a direct transmission link, etc., the data packet transmission cannot be completed very well. Therefore, there is a need to deploy a node (refer to the relay node) between the two nodes to bridge the connection. However, in general the networks have many nodes, and there are several available intermediate nodes that are responsible for relaying the data packets.

There are several challenges in terms of transmission over wireless networks such as system performance, interference, noise, fading, bandwidth, and power constraints. To overcome these issues, network coding (NC) comes into play. The NC scheme achieves the max–min-cut throughput as well as supporting the integrated accurate flow of data packets while transmitting from source(s) to receiver(s), i.e., multicast sessions and multiple unicast sessions (Li et al., 2003). Wu et al. (2004) and Katti et al. (2008) have described the straightforward implementation of NC in a topology consisting of a three-node wireless network. The NC has shown to be successfully implemented for unicast, multicast (Wu et al., 2005), and broadcast (Wu et al., 2004, Nguyen et al., 2009) transmissions over a given network topology. Depending on the NC application, the NC can be classified into two categories, i.e., Digital-NC and Analog-NC. Digital-NC: Refers to the straightforward NC in which the source node or the intermediate nodes are responsible for combining packets at the network layer (Katti et al., 2008, Li et al., 2011b, Iqbal et al., 2011). Analog-NC: The combining of symbols at the physical layer (PHY) (Zhang et al., 2006, Katti et al.,, Popovski and Yomo, 2007b). If the relay forward the continuous value via posterior probability to other node (destination) (Pu et al., 2008, Tsuji and Ohtsuki, 2010a, Tsuji and Ohtsuki, 2010b) then this schemes called Continuous-NC or soft-NC.

In recent years, the use of NC within wireless networks has witnessed significant progress. The primary question to arise from this is “Which benefits are associated with the integration of NC and RN?” NC aids RN to improve the capacity, throughput, link reliability, spectral efficiency and transmission range. Therefore, there exists a relationship between NC and RN as both schemes represent cooperative behavior. The NC-based relay nodes are different from traditional network relay nodes. Traditional network relay nodes simply replicate and forward received information. On the contrary, NC-based relay nodes prefer to apply some processing (in terms of arithmetic functions) before forwarding the received information to succeeding nodes that lead to improved performance of the system model.

In this survey, and in regards to the application of NC in a RN over PHY, we monitored the progress in terms of relaying protocols of existing schemes and their adaptation in connection to the wireless networks that ultimately achieve maximum throughput and improve the system performance. Our plan for this paper is to be a tutorial for the reader, who is familiar with NC and RN concepts. For the active researcher, we would like this paper to be employed as a utilitarian result. The subsequent details of this paper are related to the most significant implications of NC in a wireless RN from 2000 to 2011.

The rest of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 describes details related to the classification of wireless relay network. Section 3 is related to the relay models with reference to a wireless network communication system. Section 4 describes the details related to the system performance metrics such as capacity, symbol error rate, outage probability and power allocation, and throughput. Section 5 provides an overview of the NC techniques. Section 6 describes the details related to the system performance associated with conventional and NC-based wireless RN protocols. Section 7 provides an overview of relay selection and the comparison between such protocols in terms of capacity and throughput is available in Section 8. The conclusion of this study is presented in Section 9, while future work for this particular field is presented in Section 10.

Section snippets

Classification of relay networks

Whilst the degree of RN is wide, we list in this section some of the important choices/parameters. The wireless RNs are categorized as (non-exhaustive): relay models, resource allocations, diversity combination approach, performance metrics, coding strategies and particular relay modes. Concerning the relay models, it can be classified into: (a) three nodes channel model, (b) two-way relay channel (TWRC), (c) multiple-access relay channel (MARC) and (d) multi-node model. Regarding to the

Relay models

The aim of this section is to describe the main mathematical formulations of popular wireless relaying topology models (Laneman et al., 2004, Popovski and Yomo, 2007a, Ouyang and Jia, 2010, Kramer and van Wijngaarden, 2000, Sadek et al., 2007) etc.

Performance metrics

In this section, we briefly discuss various performance metrics related to the practical system communication implementation in the context of system models.

Main theorem of NC

Since 2000, many researchers have made contributions to NC. In this section, we present a concept of NC and then present a brief tutorial demonstrating that four nodes want to transmit their information to the destination node through the intermediate node. The fundamental concept of NC was proposed by Ahlswede et al. (2000). The key point of NC was that the intermediate node transmits linear combinations of received packets and attaches the encoding vector in case of multicasting (Li et al.,

Particular relay modes

In this section, we discuss some of the particular relay mode (i.e., protocol) as depicted in Fig. 9 in the next page with respect to various relay models. Ultimately, the fixed relaying protocols can be divided into two categories: family I and family II.

Family I : The relay node applies a very simple mathematical operation in the relay (i.e., multiplication or phase rotation) and the significant protocols fall under this category are AF-protocol, linear process-forward and non-linear

Relay selection

Recently, the relay selection has been shown that the performance of wireless RNs can be improve by selected the best relay for complete the transmission. This method is used in a practical environment such as satellite communications, sensor networks, or cellular networks to improve the system performance. For example, the data rate in a multiple node is less when the number of the relay nodes increase. We have discussed one example of optimal relay selection in case of TWRN based on Analog-NC.

Performance bound comparison

In this section, we provide results conclusion comparisons of two metrics performance, i.e., capacity and throughput in particular scenarios.

Conclusion

NC extends the implementation of the conventional wireless RN paradigm (i.e., extension from the simple “store-and-forward” approach to “store-process-and-forward” functionality) at the relay nodes with the ultimate goal to improve system performance. Few advantages and disadvantages of conventional networks and relay (with/without NC) networks are listed in Table 4. This paper provides an overview of classification of the RN as well as the taxonomy of particular relay modes. Following this,

Future work

This paper provided an overview of various relay network schemes that aim to achieve a better solution for wireless systems. It became evident that although NC techniques improve throughput, reliability, and have low power consumption, at the relay nodes there is a need to find a standard formula for capacity, SER, PA, and Pout. Other future dimensions include improved transmission reliability, power control and time/frequency synchronization, privacy, and error control coding in two-way

Acknowledgment

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant no. 60803005, the Important National Science and Technology Specific Projects 2010ZX03003-003 and the National Key Technology Research and Development Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China under Grant no. 2012BAH93F01.

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