System-level Simulation of Multihop Wireless Networks using Physical-layer Network Coding

We discuss the system-level simulation of an ultradense, multi-hop wireless network employing physical layer network coding to increase its throughput and eliminate the effect of interference between links in the network. We describe the network paradigm being developed by the DIWINE project, and the principles of physical layer network coding. The system-level simulator (SLS) operates on a packet level, and determines packet error probability for the network coded data at each relay in terms of the noise power and the signal level from each incoming link. We describe this simulation methodology and the software package used to implement it, and give numerical results for throughput versus load for a simple example network, showing that the approach developed by DIWINE outperforms a simple TDMA baseline scheme under most conditions.