A Joint Network and Channel Coding Strategy for Wireless Decode-and-Forward Relay Networks

In this paper, we consider a wireless multicast network with multiple sources, relays, and destinations. We adopt a multi-hop decode-and-forward relay protocol such that two canonical subnetworks are relevant, namely broadcast channel with receiver side information (BC-RSI) and orthogonal multiple access channel with correlated sources and receiver side information (MAC-CS-RSI). A joint network and channel coding (JNCC) strategy is proposed by exploiting ARQ, RSI, and correlated sources. The proposed JNCC strategy does not require the knowledge of RSI nor any transmit channel state information, such that each transmitter simply performs retransmissions until the intended receivers have accumulated enough mutual information to successfully decode all desired messages. This successful decoding is then conveyed from the receivers to the respective transmitters via an acknowledgement message. To measure the performance of the proposed JNCC strategy with ARQ, we derive closed-form expressions of network throughput by applying the renewal-reward theorem. Analytical results show that the proposed JNCC strategy outperforms, in terms of network throughput, the conventional separate network and channel coding strategy with random linear network coding.