Performance Evaluation of Joint Network-Channel Coding under a Real Network Topology Model

Adaptive network coded cooperation (ANCC) has been proposed as an effective scheme to combine network and channel coding for cooperative wireless networks by matching network-on-graph to code-on-graph. Since the real network consists of randomly faded channels, the link failure and topology change are unavoidable. In this paper, we investigate the performance of ANCC in a real wireless sensor network (WSN). Different network codes are constructed to match these instantaneous network topologies. By designing a proper network code through optimizing source node degrees, a significant performance improvement is achieved. In addition, we consider the noisy channel between the source and relay, and propose a soft information relaying based ANCC scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme considerably improves the system performance compared to the hard-decision relaying ANCC scheme.