A threshold-based opportunistic network coding method combining with compressive sensing in satellite environments

Abstract

Satellite communications have been rapidly developed due to its advantageous of wide coverage and large capacity. However, an efficient and robust transmission scheme still needs carefully designed due to the time-varying and unreliable nature of links of the satellite networks. In this paper, we consider cooperative communications by selecting relays dynamically via setting an appropriate threshold according to the real-time channel conditions to avoid error propagation and then apply opportunistic network coding (ONC) to further enhance network throughput. Considering the sparse representation of natural images, block based compressive sensing (BCS) and the proposed ONC are combined in a novel way forming an energy-efficient image processing system which is easy to be implemented. Simulation results show that the scheme we proposed can gain better performances compared with traditional cooperative and network coding methods.