Co-Designing Multi-Packet Reception, Network Coding, and MAC Using a Simple Predictive Model

TL;DR

This paper presents a cross-layer design combining multi-packet reception, network coding, and a new MAC protocol, modeled analytically to optimize throughput and fairness in wireless networks, achieving significant performance gains.

Contribution

It introduces a simple predictive model for 802.11 MAC behavior, enabling the design of a new MAC that improves throughput and fairness when combined with network coding and multi-packet reception.

Findings

Model matches experimental results for routing and network coding

New MAC significantly improves throughput and fairness

Achieves up to 6.3 times throughput gain over routing alone

Abstract

We design a cross-layer approach to optimize the joint use of multi-packet reception and network coding, in order to relieve congestion. We construct a model for the behavior of the 802.11 MAC and apply it to several key canonical topology components and their extensions to any number of nodes. The results obtained from this model match the available experimental results, which are for routing and opportunistic network coding, with fidelity. Using this model, we show that fairness allocation by the MAC can seriously impact performance; hence, we devise a new MAC that not only substantially improves throughput relative to the current 802.11 MAC, but also provides fairness to flows of information rather than to nodes. We show that the proper combination of network coding, multi-packet reception, and our new MAC protocol achieves super-additive throughput gains of up to 6.3 times that of routing alone with the use of the standard 802.11 MAC. Finally, we extend the model to analyze the asymptotic behavior of our new MAC as the number of nodes increases.