Network coding aware queue management in multi-rate wireless networks

In this thesis we focus on network coding for unicast flows, in particular we take into consideration the COPE architecture. We study what happens when two nodes transmit with different rates and we propose a Markov chain to model this scenario. Furthermore, we propose a queue management algorithm to increase the coding opportunity and the throughput of the network. In COPE, a node codes two or more packets together when packets are headed to different nexthops. When there are just packets for the same nexthop, a node loses a coding opportunity. The queue management algorithm increases the coding opportunity prioritizing the channel access of sender nodes based on the queue information and on PER of the links. We simulate this algorithm on top of COPE in a multi rate scenario with NS 2 and we show that our algorithm yields throughput gains of up to 57\% compared to COP

TCP-Aware Backpressure Routing and Scheduling

In this work, we explore the performance of backpressure routing and scheduling for TCP flows over wireless networks. TCP and backpressure are not compatible due to a mismatch between the congestion control mechanism of TCP and the queue size based routing and scheduling of the backpressure framework. We propose a TCP-aware backpressure routing and scheduling that takes into account the behavior of TCP flows. TCP-aware backpressure (i) provides throughput optimality guarantees in the Lyapunov optimization framework, (ii) gracefully combines TCP and backpressure without making any changes to the TCP protocol, (iii) improves the throughput of TCP flows significantly, and (iv) provides fairness across competing TCP flows

Intra- and Inter-Session Network Coding in Wireless Networks

In this paper, we are interested in improving the performance of constructive network coding schemes in lossy wireless environments.We propose I2NC - a cross-layer approach that combines inter-session and intra-session network coding and has two strengths. First, the error-correcting capabilities of intra-session network coding make our scheme resilient to loss. Second, redundancy allows intermediate nodes to operate without knowledge of the decoding buffers of their neighbors. Based only on the knowledge of the loss rates on the direct and overhearing links, intermediate nodes can make decisions for both intra-session (i.e., how much redundancy to add in each flow) and inter-session (i.e., what percentage of flows to code together) coding. Our approach is grounded on a network utility maximization (NUM) formulation of the problem. We propose two practical schemes, I2NC-state and I2NC-stateless, which mimic the structure of the NUM optimal solution. We also address the interaction of our approach with the transport layer. We demonstrate the benefits of our schemes through simulations