Joint Generation Network Coding in Unreliable Wireless Networks

Abstract

This paper investigates the performance of network coding (NC) in unreliable wireless networks and the integration with TCP protocol. As the wireless nodes have limited processing capacity and energy, it will be difficult for them to deal with complex problems. Coding and decoding with traditional NC will cause a large overhead for wireless nodes. It is necessary to improve the NC scheme for applying to wireless networks. Furthermore, unreliable wireless channels will result in a lot of unnecessary retransmissions in wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a joint generation network coding scheme to improve the performance of NC in wireless networks. We first analyze the impact of the probability of decoding under lossy wireless channels in the traditional NC and joint generation NC. Then, we design a scheme that integrates the proposed network coding scheme with TCP. By adopting the joint generation NC, we could avoid unnecessary retransmissions in wireless networks due to the loss of acknowledgment in TCP protocol. Our simulation results demonstrate that joint generation NC could greatly reduce retransmissions.