Time Allocation in wireless network coding

Network coding is attracting significant research interest from the academic and industrial research communities, mainly due to its simplicity of application and the large number of applications it can be suited for. Recently, more works have been targeting wireless network coding as the broadcast properties of the wireless medium render it a fertile ground for the application of network coding. One common assumption in most of the literature is that different nodes access the channel for an equal duration of time. However, such a resource allocation does not always guarantee a well partitioned system. In this work, we study two static time allocation schemes for the network coding based uplink relay channel. We derive the closed-form SINR and capacity expressions for the two schemes and provide the corresponding system level simulation results. In addition, we look at how the relative time allocation among transmitting nodes would affect the fairness/performance tradeoff.