3rd International ICST Conference on COMmunication System SoftWAre and MiddlewaRE

Research Article

Network Coding for TCP Throughput Enhancement over a Multi-Hop Wireless Network

Cite
BibTeX Plain Text
  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/COMSWA.2008.4554414,
    author={P. Samuel David and Anurag Kumar},
    title={Network Coding for TCP Throughput Enhancement over a Multi-Hop Wireless Network},
    proceedings={3rd International ICST Conference on COMmunication System SoftWAre and MiddlewaRE},
    publisher={IEEE},
    proceedings_a={COMSWARE},
    year={2008},
    month={6},
    keywords={Multi-hop wireless networks network coding TCP performance over wireless networks},
    doi={10.1109/COMSWA.2008.4554414}
}
  • P. Samuel David
    Anurag Kumar
    Year: 2008
    Network Coding for TCP Throughput Enhancement over a Multi-Hop Wireless Network
    COMSWARE
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/COMSWA.2008.4554414
P. Samuel David1,2,3,*, Anurag Kumar4,5,*
  • 1: Indian Institute of Technology, Madras; this work was done while
  • 2: this author was visiting the Indian Institute of Science under an Indian
  • 3: National Academy of Engineering Summer Fellowship
  • 4: Dept. of Electrical Communication Engg., Indian Institute of Science,
  • 5: Bangalore
*Contact email: samuel.david@smail.iitm.ac.in, anurag@ece.iisc.ernet.in

Abstract

The poor performance of TCP over multi-hop wireless networks is well known. In this paper we explore to what extent network coding can help to improve the throughput performance of TCP controlled bulk transfers over a chain topology multi-hop wireless network. The nodes use a CSMA/CA mechanism, such as IEEE 802.11’s DCF, to perform distributed packet scheduling. The reverse flowing TCP ACKs are sought to be X-ORed with forward flowing TCP data packets. We find that, without any modification to theMAC protocol, the gain from network coding is negligible. The inherent coordination problem of carrier sensing based random access in multi-hop wireless networks dominates the performance. We provide a theoretical analysis that yields a throughput bound with network coding. We then propose a distributed modification of the IEEE 802.11 DCF, based on tuning the back-off mechanism using a feedback approach. Simulation studies show that the proposed mechanism when combined with network coding, improves the performance of a TCP session by more than 100%.

Keywords
Multi-hop wireless networks network coding TCP performance over wireless networks
Published
2008-06-27
Publisher
IEEE
Modified
2010-05-16
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/COMSWA.2008.4554414
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