A cooperative network coding approach to reliable Wireless Body Area Networks with demodulate-and-forward

Abstract

In this paper, a novel cooperative transmission scheme via network coding has been proposed for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) to enhance reliability and throughput. In the proposed scheme, namely Random XOR Network Coding (RXNC), each relay demodulates the received signal from each sensor node and then selects d different coded symbols amongst them and XORs them to generate a network coded symbol. We have found the optimum value of d through an analytical approach by minimizing the probability that an XOR network coded symbol is incorrectly generated. Simulation results show that the proposed RXNC scheme outperforms the no-cooperation and conventional bitwise network coding schemes in all channel signal to noise ratios (SNRs) from 0 dB to 18 dB.