Heuristics for Network Coding in Wireless Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces new simple heuristics for network coding-based broadcasting in wireless networks, improving performance in small, sparse, or inhomogeneous settings by leveraging local topology information.

Contribution

It proposes novel heuristics for rate selection in network coding broadcasts, enhancing efficiency in non-homogeneous wireless networks.

Findings

Heuristics perform well in small and inhomogeneous networks.

Experimental results show significant performance improvements.

Heuristics are simple and rely on local topology information.

Abstract

Multicast is a central challenge for emerging multi-hop wireless architectures such as wireless mesh networks, because of its substantial cost in terms of bandwidth. In this report, we study one specific case of multicast: broadcasting, sending data from one source to all nodes, in a multi-hop wireless network. The broadcast we focus on is based on network coding, a promising avenue for reducing cost; previous work of ours showed that the performance of network coding with simple heuristics is asymptotically optimal: each transmission is beneficial to nearly every receiver. This is for homogenous and large networks of the plan. But for small, sparse or for inhomogeneous networks, some additional heuristics are required. This report proposes such additional new heuristics (for selecting rates) for broadcasting with network coding. Our heuristics are intended to use only simple local topology information. We detail the logic of the heuristics, and with experimental results, we illustrate the behavior of the heuristics, and demonstrate their excellent performance.