MAC Centered Cooperation - Synergistic Design of Network Coding, Multi-Packet Reception, and Improved Fairness to Increase Network Throughput

TL;DR

This paper presents a cross-layer design combining network coding, multi-packet reception, and a new MAC protocol to significantly enhance wireless network throughput and fairness, outperforming standard IEEE 802.11 MAC in various scenarios.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel MAC protocol that, together with network coding and MPR, achieves super-additive throughput gains and improved fairness in wireless networks.

Findings

Super-additive throughput gains up to 6.3 times.

Fairness to flows rather than nodes improves performance.

Model accurately predicts behavior of the proposed system.

Abstract

We design a cross-layer approach to aid in develop- ing a cooperative solution using multi-packet reception (MPR), network coding (NC), and medium access (MAC). We construct a model for the behavior of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol and apply it to key small canonical topology components and their larger counterparts. The results obtained from this model match the available experimental results with fidelity. Using this model, we show that fairness allocation by the IEEE 802.11 MAC can significantly impede performance; hence, we devise a new MAC that not only substantially improves throughput, but provides fairness to flows of information rather than to nodes. We show that cooperation between NC, MPR, and our new MAC achieves super-additive gains of up to 6.3 times that of routing with the standard IEEE 802.11 MAC. Furthermore, we extend the model to analyze our MAC's asymptotic and throughput behaviors as the number of nodes increases or the MPR capability is limited to only a single node. Finally, we show that although network performance is reduced under substantial asymmetry or limited implementation of MPR to a central node, there are some important practical cases, even under these conditions, where MPR, NC, and their combination provide significant gains.