Information Exchange in Wireless Networks with Network Coding and Physical-layer Broadcast

The exchange of independent information between two nodes in a wireless network can be viewed as two unicast sessions, corresponding to information transfer along one direction and the opposite direction. In this paper we show such information exchange can be efficiently performed by exploiting network coding and the physical-layer broadcast property offered by the wireless medium, which improves upon conventional solutions that separate the processing of the two unicast sessions. We propose a distributed scheme that obviates the need for synchronization and is robust to random packet loss and delay, and so on. The scheme is simple and incurs minor overhead.