CooPNC: A cooperative multicast protocol exploiting physical layer network coding

In this paper we present a multicast protocol for short range networks that exploits the characteristics of physical layer network coding. In our proposed protocol, named CooPNC, we provide a novel cooperative approach that allows collision resolutions with the use of an indirect inter-network cooperation scheme. Through this scheme, we provide a reliable multicast protocol for partially overlapping short range networks with low control overhead. We show that with CooPNC higher throughput and energy efficiency are achieved, while it presents lower delay compared to state of the art multicast protocols. We provide an overview of our protocol with a simple scenario of overlapping networks and we then generalise its operation for a scalable scenario. Through mathematical analysis and simulations we prove that CooPNC presents significant performance gains compared to the state of the art in multicast communications for short range networks.