CATWOMAN: Implementation and Performance Evaluation of IEEE 802.11 Based Multi-Hop Networks Using Network Coding

Abstract

This paper investigates the performance of network coding for an IEEE802.11 enabled meshed network. By means of basic setups the impact of the medium access control in combination with network coding is investigated. In contrast to prior work the network coding approach is tailored to commercial WiFi hardware without any special tweaks. The implementation of network coding is done on top of an existing routing scheme known as B.A.T.M.A.N. which has some inherent advantages to support network coding. We present schemes to utilize the B.A.T.M.A.N. routing to detect coding opportunities. One finding is that the performance gain for the well known Alice and Bob scenario using network coding is 60% compared to a pure relaying scheme. The software used in the presented measurement campaign is made publicly available.

Impact of network coding on delay and throughput in practical wireless chain topologies

“…Each node is controlled and configured from a central server, which also executes tests and fetches results from the two end-nodes (Alice and Bob). We use the CATWOMAN (Coding Applied To Wireless Over Mobile Ad-hoc Networks) scheme from [3]. CATWOMAN is developed as an extension to the batman-adv kernel module, which is a state-of-the-art implementation of the B.A.T.M.A.N.…”

“…The latter is investigated thoroughly in [2], where the COPE scheme implements network coding to combine multiple packets in one transmission. A similar approach is implemented by CATWOMAN in [3], which shows results similar to COPE. Furthermore, CATWOMAN has been evaluated with respect to energy efficiency in [4] and [5], and also confirms analytical results in [6].…”

“…On the other hand, CATWOMAN benefits from the MAC gain described in [2] and [3], which makes up for the increased packet loss. We also expect CATWOMAN to show high delays when the network is not congested.…”

Security concerns and countermeasures in network coding based communication systems: A survey

“…The COPE [66] protocol, which runs between the IP and MAC layers, is a state-aware NC protocol that uses local information and network state information. The other state-aware NC protocols are explained in [34,67,68]. By using network state information, these protocols try to achieve improvements in terms of throughput and robustness however other issues raises that should be handled such as:…”

Robust Network Coding in transport networks

“…Although the benefits of network coding were already demonstrated in wireless networks [1], it took a long journey to manifest its real benefits for transport networks (i.e., increased throughput, lower computational complexity, robustness against failures, security). This effort evolved from a purely information theoretic perspective, through a really efficient algebraic representation, to a combinatorial approach [2].…”