In recent years, network coding has emerged as an innovative method that helps a wireless network approach its maximum capacity, by combining multiple unicasts in one broadcast. However, the majority of research conducted in this area is yet to fully utilize the broadcasting nature of wireless networks, and still assumes fixed route between the source and destination that every packet should travel through. This assumption not only limits coding opportunities, but can also cause buffer overflow in some specific intermediate nodes. Although some studies considered scattering of the flows dynamically in the network, they still face some limitations. This paper explains pros and cons of some prominent research in network coding and proposes a Flexible and Opportunistic Network Coding scheme (FlexONC) as a solution to such issues. Furthermore, this research discovers that the conditions used in previous studies to combine packets of different flows are overly optimistic and would affect the network performance adversarially. Therefore, we provide a more accurate set of rules for packet encoding. The experimental results show that FlexONC outperforms previous methods especially in networks with high bit error rate, by better utilizing redundant packets spread in the network.
In inter-flow network coding, an intermediate node combines two packets if the next-hop of each packet has already received the other coding partner. To keep track of the packets received by each node, two types of information are used: deterministic information and probabilistic information. Deterministic information are provided by exchanging reception reports'' among nodes, where each node's reception report contains the packets that recently have been received or overheard by the node @cite_9 . These reception reports are usually piggybacked on data packets or broadcasted periodically.
@cite_9
2149863032
This paper proposes COPE, a new architecture for wireless mesh networks. In addition to forwarding packets, routers mix (i.e., code) packets from different sources to increase the information content of each transmission. We show that intelligently mixing packets increases network throughput. Our design is rooted in the theory of network coding. Prior work on network coding is mainly theoretical and focuses on multicast traffic. This paper aims to bridge theory with practice; it addresses the common case of unicast traffic, dynamic and potentially bursty flows, and practical issues facing the integration of network coding in the current network stack. We evaluate our design on a 20-node wireless network, and discuss the results of the first testbed deployment of wireless network coding. The results show that using COPE at the forwarding layer, without modifying routing and higher layers, increases network throughput. The gains vary from a few percent to several folds depending on the traffic pattern, congestion level, and transport protocol.