Time and Power Scheduling in a Wireless Network with Network Coding and Bidirectional Relaying

Using network coding in a wireless network can potentially improve the network throughput. On the other hand, it increases the complexity of resource allocations as the quality of one transmission is often affected by the link conditions of the transmitter node to multiple destination nodes. In this paper we consider a wireless network using network coding, where one relay node is available for each bidirectional link. Both digital and analog network coding strategies, referred to as DNC and ANC, respectively, are considered. All transmissions share the same frequency channel, and therefore simultaneous transmissions cause interference to each other. For ANC, transmission power of the nodes at different time slots can be co-related. We study link transmission scheduling, and in specific, the transmission time and power for each node so that the overall network throughput is maximized. Our results indicate that the two types of network coding strategies can outperform each other depending on the network conditions.