Peer conscious opportunistic network coded cooperative system for next generation wireless networks

Abstract

Today’s wireless networks aim to obtain data using faster and reliable methods. This is achieved by developments made both at the physical (PHY) layer and medium access control (MAC) layer. The concept of cooperative communication (CC) and network coding (NC) were introduced to obtain reliability and higher throughput, respectively. Network Coded Cooperation (NCC) aims to fulfill the requirement of both reliability and higher throughput at one go. Although, NCC provides both reliability and a higher throughput, the reliability of data stays at stake since a basic NCC scenario does not take into account the channel conditions between the nodes. A predefined time division multiple access (TDMA) schedule needs to be followed by source nodes. Here, we propose a framework for peer conscious opportunistic network coded cooperation (PC-O-NCC) system that exploits multi-user diversity (MUD) gain in a simple NCC based network thus, providing 5G and beyond users with reliable yet faster communication. It prioritizes sources with better channel conditions by granting them earlier access than the other competing nodes unlike the prevalent TDMA scheme used widely in any NCC network. This improves the outage performance of the overall system. To prioritise sources with better channel conditions, a simple timer based MAC protocol is proposed. The proposed protocol is designed such that it aims to reduce collisions by taking the network load into account while generating the timer values which also improves the throughput of the network. It also minimizes the power consumption in performing clear channel assessment (CCA) by sources which is a costly affair for battery operated devices. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed algorithm improves the outage performance when compared to a NCC network using carrier sense multiple-access/collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) or the prevailing TDMA technique while keeping the latency to a minimum value. The improvement in the outage performance can prove to be important in taking key decisions which becomes crucial in disaster management, war scenarios or in Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication.