A Physical-Layer Network Coding Aware Distributed Scheduling Policy

Physical-Layer Network Coding (PLNC) was first introduced as a solution to increase the throughput in simple bidirectional communication schemes. Unlike most wireless communication techniques which try to avoid collisions, PLNC allows two simultaneous transmissions to a common receiver. In this work, we propose a MAC layer distributed and realistic scheduling policy targeting PLNC based networks. In order to easily operate in large ad-hoc networks, our solution is completely decentralized and runs in constant time. By basing the transmission priority of every node on the queue sizes of its local neighbors and PLNC opportunities, our solution ensures high throughput when compared to classical interference-free scheduling. Both our theoretical analysis corroborated by our simulation results highlight that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing scheduling policies with throughput gains of around 35%.