A modular framework for implementing joint wireless network coding and scheduling algorithms

Abstract

Intersession network coding (NC) can provide significant performance benefits via mixing packets at wireless routers; these benefits are especially pronounced when NC is applied in conjunction with intelligent scheduling. NC, however, imposes certain processing operations, such as encoding, decoding, copying, and storage. When not utilized carefully, all these operations can induce tremendous processing overheads in practical settings. Our testbed measurements suggest that such processing operations can severely degrade the router throughput, especially at high bit rates. Motivated by this, we design network coding framework for rate adaptive wireless links (NCRAWL). The design of NCRAWL facilitates low overhead NC operations, thereby effectively approaching the theoretically expected throughput benefits of joint NC and scheduling. We implement and evaluate NCRAWL on a wireless testbed. Our experiments demonstrate that NCRAWL meets the theoretical predicted throughput gain while requiring much less CPU processing, compared to related frameworks.