Effects of MAC Approaches on Non-Monotonic Saturation with COPE - A Simple Case Study

TL;DR

This paper presents a simple network model to evaluate how different MAC strategies affect throughput and fairness in network coding scenarios, demonstrating that tailored MAC design can achieve significant throughput gains and monotonic saturation.

Contribution

The paper introduces a model to analyze the impact of MAC approaches on network coding performance, proposing a MAC that ensures monotonic saturation and fairness, with potential sixfold throughput improvements.

Findings

MAC can cause non-monotonic saturation behavior.

Fairness allocation impacts network throughput.

Proposed MAC achieves higher, monotonic saturation and fairness.

Abstract

We construct a simple network model to provide insight into network design strategies. We show that the model can be used to address various approaches to network coding, MAC, and multi-packet reception so that their effects on network throughput can be evaluated. We consider several topology components which exhibit the same non-monotonic saturation behavior found within the Katti et. al. COPE experiments. We further show that fairness allocation by the MAC can seriously impact performance and cause this non-monotonic saturation. Using our model, we develop a MAC that provides monotonic saturation, higher saturation throughput gains and fairness among flows rather than nodes. The proposed model provides an estimate of the achievable gains for the cross-layer design of network coding, multi-packet reception, and MAC showing that super-additive throughput gains on the order of six times that of routing are possible.