Loss-Aware Network Coding for Unicast Wireless Sessions: Design, Implementation, and Performance Evaluation

Local network coding is growing in prominence as a technique to facilitate greater capacity utilization in multi-hop wireless networks. A specific objective of such local network coding techniques has been to explicitly minimize the total number of transmissions needed to carry packets across each wireless hop. While such a strategy is certainly useful, we argue that in lossy wireless environments, a better use of local network coding is to provide higher levels of redundancy even at the cost of increasing the number of transmissions required to communicate the same information. In this paper we show that the design space for effective redundancy in local network coding is quite large, which makes optimal formulations of the problem hard to realize in practice. We present a detailed exploration of this design space and propose a suite of algorithms, called CLONE, that can lead to further throughput gains in multi-hop wireless scenarios. Through careful analysis, simulations, and detailed implementation on a real testbed, we show that some of our simplest CLONE algorithms can be efficiently implemented in today’s wireless hardware to provide a factor of two improvement in throughput for example scenarios, while other, more effective, CLONE algorithms require additional advances in hardware processing speeds to be deployable in practice.