Throughput Gain of Random Wireless Networks with Physical-Layer Network Coding

This study analyzes the impact of Physical-layer Network Coding (PNC) on the throughput of a large random wireless network, including one-dimensional and two-dimensional networks. Three different transmission schemes, (1) a traditional flow-based scheme, (2) a network coding scheme, and (3) the PNC scheme are compared to show that the PNC scheme improves wireless network throughput by a constant factor without changing the scaling law compared to the traditional flow-based and network coding schemes. Furthermore, PNC can reduce the effect of interference for the one-dimensional networks, and has a tighter throughput bound for the two-dimensional network.