Near-optimal co-ordinated coding in wireless multihop networks

The recent work on COPE by Katti et al. demonstrates a practical application of network coding to wireless multihop networks. We note, however, that the opportunistic nature of COPE leaves it at the mercy of higher and lower layer protocols to create coding opportunities spontaneously. In this paper, we go one step beyond COPE's opportunism and study how to create coding opportunities in a more deterministic, yet still practical way. We start from the insight that in two-way traffic the existence of coding opportunities can be guaranteed through carefully co-ordinated packet scheduling, and establish general properties of protocols that are able to achieve this. We then propose Near-Optimal Coordinated Coding (noCoCo), a cross-layer scheme that integrates per-hop packet scheduling, network coding, and congestion control in a novel way. Extensive simulations show that noCoCo significantly outperforms standard non-coding approaches as well as COPE in terms of network throughput, de...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CONEXT
• Authors: Björn Scheuermann, Wenjun Hu, Jon Crowcroft
• Keywords: Computer Networks, CONEXT 2007, Near-Optimal Coordinated Coding, Network Coding, Packet Scheduling