The 1st International ICST Workshop on Network Coding in Wireless Relay Network

Research Article

Network Coding with Relay Assistance in Multi-rate Wireless Networks

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/ChinaCom.2011.6158324,
        author={Meng Huang and Gang Feng and Yide Zhang},
        title={Network Coding with Relay Assistance in Multi-rate Wireless Networks},
        proceedings={The 1st International ICST Workshop on Network Coding in Wireless Relay Network},
        publisher={IEEE},
        proceedings_a={NRN},
        year={2012},
        month={3},
        keywords={network coding multi-rate relay mac},
        doi={10.1109/ChinaCom.2011.6158324}
    }
    
  • Meng Huang
    Gang Feng
    Yide Zhang
    Year: 2012
    Network Coding with Relay Assistance in Multi-rate Wireless Networks
    NRN
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/ChinaCom.2011.6158324
Meng Huang1, Gang Feng1,*, Yide Zhang1
  • 1: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
*Contact email: hotreed_11@yahoo.com.cn

Abstract

Network coding has been proven as a very promising technique to improve wireless network throughput. In multi-rate wireless networks, simply seeking more coding opportunities or encoding more packets into one frame without exploiting multi-rate feature may lead to selecting low-rate links for transmission, and thus compromise the performance gain brought by network coding. In this paper, we aim at exploiting the potential benefits brought by both multi-rate and network coding. We carefully address the bottleneck problem in applying network coding to multi-rate networks, and propose Network Coding with Relay Assistance, called NCRA. We design a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol based on 802.11 DCF to implement the idea of NCRA. Numerical results of both analytical modeling and simulation experiments based on NS-2 demonstrate that NCRA can significantly improve network performances in terms of both throughput and end-to-end delay, at a relatively low cost of header overhead.