Patent ID: 9231738
Filing Date: 2016-01-05
CPC Classification: H04B,H04L,H04W

Claim Text:
1. A communication method of a relay node for network coding, the method comprising: verifying whether a second next node of the relay node is a neighbor of a previous node of the relay node; requesting the second next node to overhear a packet transmitted by the previous node; receiving the packet from the previous node that is to be subsequently transmitted to a next node; receiving an acknowledgment from the second next node indicating that the packet transmitted by the previous node and subsequently intended for the next node was overheard by the second next node, in response to the second next node overhearing the packet and verifying a sender address of the packet corresponds to the previous node; determining that the second next node is a node on a path from the relay node that is capable of participating in the network coding based on an acknowledgment transmitted by the second next node; and performing the network coding on the overheard packet received by the second next node based on the acknowledgment received from the second next node; wherein each of the previous nodes of the relay node and the next nodes of the relay node generates a neighbor list containing information associated with neighbor nodes, and the verifying comprises: requesting, by the relay node, the previous nodes of the relay node to transmit the neighbor list, and verifying, by the relay node using the neighbor lists, whether the next nodes of the relay node are the neighbors of the previous nodes of the relay node; wherein, in response to the relay node performing network coding with respect to a packet, a header of the packet includes a first area including information associated with the network coding, a second area including information associated with the packet overheard by a next node of the relay node, and a flag indicating whether the network coding is enabled with respect to the packet or whether an acknowledgement is enabled with respect to the packet.