Network Coding Aware User Plane for Mobile Networks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a network coding (NC) enabled transmission strategy in the User Plane (UP) of mobile backhaul for networks operators. In the proposed method, NC provides robustness against the transport network failures, so that there will not be any more processing for re-transmission by the User Equipment (UE) in comparison to traditional approaches where re-transmissions are performed by UE applications. Our simulation results indicate that an average 1% loss ratio in the backhaul link creates 59.44% additional total transmission time compared to normal standard GPRS Tunneling Protocol -User Plane (GTP-U) transmission. On the other hand, applying NC at 1% and 2% rates reduces this amount to 52.99% and 56.26% respectively, which is also better than the total transmission time performance of some previously studied dynamic replication schemes as keeping bandwidth utilization at low ratios. Moreover, we also observe a trade-off between total transmission time and NC rate related to expected packet loss ratio such that minimum total transmission time is obtained when NC rate is equal to expected packet loss rate.

Enhancing the Capabilities of Mobile Backhaul: A User Plane Perspective

“…The authors in [20] used NC as a potential solution to improve end-to-end latency and reliability, focusing on the Integrated Access Backhaul (IAB) networks introduced by 3GPP. It has been shown that NC of UP provides a visible improvement in application performance in lossy backhaul links [21]. However, the work in [21] does not consider the asymptotic behaviour of the approach and also lacks comparisons with different implementations of RAN functions (e.g., with caching) in UP.…”

“…It has been shown that NC of UP provides a visible improvement in application performance in lossy backhaul links [21]. However, the work in [21] does not consider the asymptotic behaviour of the approach and also lacks comparisons with different implementations of RAN functions (e.g., with caching) in UP.…”

“…We performed experiments in Network Simulator 3 (NS3) to demonstrate the benefits of the NC approach of [21], the dynamic replication approach of [16], and the UP caching approach proposed in this paper. We used the Lena Evolved Packet Core (EPC) module [35] in NS3 to simulate the S1 interface and use the NC implementation in this interface.…”