NC-ALOHA: A novel MAC protocol

This paper presents a novel network coding (NC) medium access control (MAC) protocol design, named NC-ALOHA. The basic idea of NC-ALOHA is completing the network coding process during one packet per slot at each transmitting terminal; the network coding coefficient vectors used by different transmitting terminals are orthogonal with each other. By virtue of network coding, traditional collision assumption is changed, so that more than one transmitting terminals could send packets at the same slot. Quantitative throughput analysis is conducted for NC-ALOHA protocol and its performance is verified by simulation. It is observed that significant throughput improvement and delay decrease can be achieved in comparison with slotted ALOHA protocol.