On Capacity of Random Wireless Networks with Physical-Layer Network Coding

Throughput capacity of a random wireless network has been studied extensively in the literature. Most existing studies were based on the assumption that each transmission involves only one transmitter in order to avoid interference. However, recent studies on physical-layer network coding (PLNC) have shown that such an assumption can be relaxed to improve throughput performance of a wireless network. In PLNC, signals from different senders can be transmitted to the same receiver in the same channel simultaneously. In this paper, we investigate the impact of PLNC on throughput capacity of a random wireless network. Our study reveals that, although PLNC scheme does not change the scaling law, it can improve throughput capacity by a fixed factor. Specifically, for a one-dimensional network, we observe that PLNC can eliminate the effect of interference in some scenarios. A tighter capacity bound is derived for a two-dimensional network. In addition, we also show achievable lower bounds for random wireless networks with network coding and PLNC.