Cooperative Network Coding-Aware Routing for Multi-Rate Wireless Networks

Abstract

Abstract-Recent research has proven that network coding has great potential to improve network throughput in wireless networks. To fully exploit the performance gain brought by network coding, coding-aware routing has been studied to proactively change route of flows for creating more coding opportunities. However, in today's multi-rate wireless networks, coding may not be a wise decision as the lowest rate has to be used for coded information broadcasting, which causes significant resource waste for the high-rate links. In this paper, we propose the idea of cooperative network coding (CNC) to exploit spatial diversity for improving coding opportunity. We provide a theoretical formulation for calculating the maximal throughput of unicast traffic that can be achieved with CNC in multi-rate wireless networks. CNCaware routing under both Alice-Bob and X-structure are discussed in this paper. The performance evaluation demonstrates that a CNC-aware route selection scheme that leverages cooperative communication to improve coding opportunity leads to higher end-to-end throughput comparing with the coding-oblivious and traditional coding-aware schemes.

Correlated Coding: Efficient Network Coding under Correlated Unreliable Wireless Links

“…The benefits of network coding in [14], [17], [26] are not fully exploited since the coding opportunity is dependent on the routing path and their coding un-aware routing strategies miss many coding opportunities. The authors in [16], [21], [25], [28] thus propose coding-aware routings to exploit more coding opportunities. These studies implicitly or explicitly assume that wireless links are independent.…”

“…Ignoring this correlation in network coding protocol design may result in under-utilized diversity benefits [14], [22]. Even worse, because of the inaccurate link independent assumption, unnecessary coding operations exploited by coding aware routings [16], [21], [25], [28] may lead to extra energy consumption.…”

Analysis of General Network Coding Conditions and Design of a Free-Ride-Oriented Routing Metric

“…See [30] for more details. As aforementioned in Section II, there have been several works [15], [16], [22] that explore the throughput gain through codingaware routing by solving optimization problems; however, these approaches are centralized and are difficult to apply in practical protocol designs.…”

Coolest Path: Spectrum Mobility Aware Routing Metrics in Cognitive Ad Hoc Networks

“…Joint routing and resource management is proposed to achieve optimal spectrum efficiency in the network with frequency-agile radios [28]. Adopting cooperative network coding in route selection, the throughput of unicast traffic can be improved in multi-rate wireless networks [29]. However, the works mentioned above are all based on the accurate spectrum sensing or prediction which is hard to implement in real world scenarios.…”