Predicting the Performance of Cooperative Wireless Networking Schemes With Random Network Coding

In this paper, we consider a cooperative wireless network in which there are multiple sources and multiple relays. Owing to unreliable wireless channels, the quality of network links between nodes can vary. This results in the failure of intermediate nodes that generate linear combinations of incoming messages in network coding schemes. We propose an analytical framework to evaluate the recovery performance of source messages at the base station. To this end, we consider a random transmission matrix in which each element of the transmission matrix is processed a random variable, where its distribution is a function of the outage probability. We derive an upper bound for the reconstruction performance, i.e., decoding failure probability and nullity. The proposed framework provides an evaluation tool that enables us to investigate the impact of a large number of sources and relays, as well as the field size of the network codes on system performance.