Cooperative mechanism for PNC two-hop slotted ALOHA network

In this paper, we propose a buffer-information-aided (BIA) request to send (RTS)/clear to send (CTS) mechanism to improve the throughput performance of physical-layer network coding (PNC) in a slotted-ALOHA two-hop relay network. In the proposed BIA mechanism, the relay node collects the information of the destination address of the first several packets at the sending buffers of the client nodes, and determines the transmission client nodes at the next time slot. Therefore, the collision probability can be decreased and the proportion of PNC transmissions among the total transmissions is improved. Simulation results show that compared with the traditional RTS/CTS mechanism, the proposed cooperative mechanism can greatly improve the PNC network throughput.