Trade-off between cost and goodput in wireless: Replacing transmitters with coding

TL;DR

This paper investigates how coding protocols like TCP/NC can improve the effective data transfer rate in wireless networks, reducing costs by making better use of available resources despite lossy conditions.

Contribution

It demonstrates that employing resilient coding protocols can enhance goodput and reduce network costs, especially in lossy wireless environments, challenging the assumption that higher bandwidth always improves performance.

Findings

TCP/NC improves goodput in lossy networks

Using coding protocols reduces network costs

Better resource utilization speeds up user transactions

Abstract

We study the cost of improving the goodput, or the useful data rate, to user in a wireless network. We measure the cost in terms of number of base stations, which is highly correlated to the energy cost as well as capital and operational costs of a network provider.We show that increasing the available bandwidth, or throughput, may not necessarily lead to increase in goodput, particularly in lossy wireless networks in which TCP does not perform well. As a result, much of the resources dedicated to the user may not translate to high goodput, resulting in an inefficient use of the network resources. We show that using protocols such as TCP/NC, which are more resilient to erasures and failures in the network, may lead to a goodput commensurate the throughput dedicated to each user. By increasing goodput, users' transactions are completed faster; thus, the resources dedicated to these users can be released to serve other requests or transactions. Consequently, we show that translating efficiently throughput to goodput may bring forth better connection to users while reducing the cost for the network providers.