On energy efficient routing using cooperative physical layer network coding

In this paper, we focus on energy efficient routing in wireless ad hoc networks. We exploit modulo combining of continuous-time signals arriving at a receiving node from a number of synchronized transmitting nodes and introduce a cooperative physical layer network coding (CPLNC) scheme. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in saving energy, we incorporate CPLNC in two major energy-efficient routing algorithms. In the resulting modified algorithms, we derive threshold distances that enable the current node to intelligently decide whether it should use CPLNC or point to point transmission for the next hop. Simulation results confirm that the energy saving gains of the proposed new algorithms significantly outperform that of the baseline energy-efficient routing algorithms.