Network coding hard and soft decision behavior over the physical layer using PUMTC

Network Coding (NC) is a technique applied to transmit combined packets rather than sending them separately, resulting in both data rate and bandwidth savings. In this paper, the behavior of hard and soft decision encoding/decoding is investigated using Partial Unit Memory Turbo Code (PUMTC) as the forward error correction method, over the physical layer when communication between users (nodes) is performed via an Amplitude and Forward (AF) Base Station (BS). NC is applied in the BS over the received packets before forwarding them to the destination. The simulation results show that soft decision encoding/decoding outperforms hard decision decoding, by around 0.4 dB which is regarded as a good improvement, taking into consideration that the system becomes less complex due to the removal of the hard decision block before decoding the received data in the BS and at the destination.