Miss and Forward: Exploiting Diversity With Intrasession Network Coding

Faced with explosive mobile data demand, ultrasense network is emerging as a solution for the 5G networks, which introduces new opportunities for space diversity. In this paper, we propose Miss-and-Forward (MF), a new paradigm for intrasession network coding, in which a special relay called “helper” is assigned to exploit the rich diversity. In accordance, a network coding based scheme is designed, which has the ability to restore the “missed” information and in the meanwhile retains the benefit of state-of-the-art batched sparse coding. Mathematically, we show that the source of throughput gain is the higher ranked end-to-end transfer matrix. Besides, we provide a systematical design to address some practical issues such as helper selection and rank distribution estimation. Both numerical and simulation results show that our method significantly outperforms fountain codes and existing network coding schemes.