M-PNC: Multi-hop physical layer network coding for shared paths in vehicular networks

In wireless networks, spectral efficiency is an important issue due to limited available bandwidth. Traditionally, when a receiver collects simultaneous transmissions, packets collide and the much meaningful information cannot be retrieved. Thus, through suitable scheduling, simultaneous transmissions to the receiver are avoided. However, in physical layer network coding, simultaneous transmissions are allowed and the combined signal is equivalent of XOR operation on air. A path from a source to a destination in unicast routing in VANET is called a flow; multiple flows may have common road segments. There will be heavy contention in such shared road segments resulting in lower throughput, lower packet delivery ratio and higher end to end delay. In this paper, we propose a multihop physical layer network coding structure to be used by multiple flows of unicast routing paths. We analyze throughput, end-to-end delay and coding gain with respect to number of routing flows and number of forwarders involved in network coding.