Applications of Temporal Network Coding in V2X Communications

Due to network dynamics and channel fading, multi-hop communication in vehicular networks usually suffers from much higher packet loss rate than the conventional static or single-hop networks. By encoding over packets received at different time slots at the intermediate nodes, temporal network coding (TNC) is a promising technique to avoid erasure accumulation with communication hops. In this paper, we present different strategies of TNC schemes to meet the decoding and delay requirements of different V2X (vehicle to everything) applications. Specifically, for applications with stringent delay requirement, such as live video streaming, we propose to use chunked TNC without precoding. For multi-hop communications with high throughput requirement, we propose to apply carefully designed precoding on top of the TNC to enhance the end-to-end throughput. Different from the conventional TNC code designs, we apply TNC design with overhearing, exploiting the broadcast nature of wireless communication. Specifically, we assume that a vehicle can not only receive the packets from its immediate upstream vehicle, but also overhear some packets from further-upstream vehicles. The number of network coded packets generated at the intermediate nodes is designed by considering the packets received via both the upstream and overheard transmission, which helps to maximize the communication throughput delivered to the destination node.