Network coding for transport protocols

With the proliferation of smart devices that require Internet connectivity anytime, anywhere, and the recent technological advances that make it possible, current networked systems will have to provide a various range of services, such as content distribution, in a wide range of settings, including wireless environments. Wireless links may experience temporary losses, however, TCP, the de facto protocol for robust unicast communications, reacts by reducing the congestion window drastically and injecting less traffic in the network. Consequently the wireless links are underutilized and the overall performance of the TCP protocol in wireless environments is poor. As content delivery (i.e. multicasting) services, such as BBC iPlayer, become popular, the network needs to support the reliable transport of the data at high rates, and with specific delay constraints. A typical approach to deliver content in a scalable way is to rely on peer-to-peer technology (used by BitTorrent, Spotify and PPLive), where users share their resources, including bandwidth, storage space, and processing power. Still, these systems suffer from the lack of incentives for resource sharing and cooperation, and this problem is exacerbated in the presence of heterogenous users, where a tit-for-tat scheme is difficult to implement. Due to the issues highlighted above, current network architectures need to be changed in order to accommodate the users¿ demands for reliable and quality communications. In other words, the emergent need for advanced modes of information transport requires revisiting and improving network components at various levels of the network stack. The innovative paradigm of network coding has been shown as a promising technique to change the design of networked systems, by providing a shift from how data flows traditionally move through the network. This shift implies that data flows are no longer kept separate, according to the ¿store-and-forward¿ model, but they are also processed and mixed in the network. By appropriately combining data by means of network coding, it is expected to obtain significant benefits in several areas of network design and architecture. In this thesis, we set out to show the benefits of including network coding into three communication paradigms, namely point-topoint communications (e.g. unicast), point-to-multipoint communications (e.g. multicast), and multipoint-to-multipoint communications (e.g. peer-to-peer networks). For the first direction, we propose a network coding-based multipath scheme and show that TCP unicast sessions are feasible in highly volatile wireless environments. For point-to-multipoint communications, we give an algorithm to optimally achieve all the rate pairs from the rate region in the case of degraded multicast over the combination network. We also propose a system for live streaming that ensures reliability and quality of service to heterogenous users, even if data transmissions occur over lossy wireless links. Finally, for multipoint-to-multipoint communications, we design a system to provide incentives for live streaming in a peer-to-peer setting, where users have subscribed to different levels of quality. Our work shows that network coding enables a reliable transport of data, even in highly volatile environments, or in delay sensitive scenarios such as live streaming, and facilitates the implementation of an efficient incentive system, even in the presence of heterogenous users. Thus, network coding can solve the challenges faced by next generation networks in order to support advanced information transport.Postprint (published version

Network coding meets multimedia: a review

While every network node only relays messages in a traditional communication system, the recent network coding (NC) paradigm proposes to implement simple in-network processing with packet combinations in the nodes. NC extends the concept of "encoding" a message beyond source coding (for compression) and channel coding (for protection against errors and losses). It has been shown to increase network throughput compared to traditional networks implementation, to reduce delay and to provide robustness to transmission errors and network dynamics. These features are so appealing for multimedia applications that they have spurred a large research effort towards the development of multimedia-specific NC techniques. This paper reviews the recent work in NC for multimedia applications and focuses on the techniques that fill the gap between NC theory and practical applications. It outlines the benefits of NC and presents the open challenges in this area. The paper initially focuses on multimedia-specific aspects of network coding, in particular delay, in-network error control, and mediaspecific error control. These aspects permit to handle varying network conditions as well as client heterogeneity, which are critical to the design and deployment of multimedia systems. After introducing these general concepts, the paper reviews in detail two applications that lend themselves naturally to NC via the cooperation and broadcast models, namely peer-to-peer multimedia streaming and wireless networkin

Network coding: from theory to media streaming

Network coding has recently emerged as an alternative to traditional routing algorithms in communication systems. In network coding, the network nodes can combine the packets they receive before forwarding them to the neighbouring nodes. Intensive research efforts have demonstrated that such a processing in the network nodes can provide advantages in terms of throughput or robustness. These potentials, combined with the advent of ad hoc and wireless delivery architectures have triggered the interest of research community about the application of the network coding principles to streaming applications. This paper describes the potentials of network coding in emerging delivery architectures such as overlay or peer-to-peer networks. It overviews the principles of practical network coding algorithms and outlines the challenges posed by multimedia streaming applications. Finally, it provides a survey of the recent work on the application of network coding to media streaming applications, both in wireless or wired communication scenarios. Promising results have been demonstrated where network coding is able to bring benefits in media streaming applications. However, delay and complexity constraints are often posed as the main challenging issues that still prevent the wide-scale deployment of network coding algorithms in multimedia communication

Wireless Network Coding: Opportunities and Challenges

Wireless networks suffer from a variety of unique problems such as low throughput, dead spots, and inadequate support for mobility. However, their characteristics such as the broadcast nature of the medium, spatial diversity, and significant data redundancy, provide opportunities for new design principles to address these problems. There has been recent interest in employing network coding in wireless networks. This paper explores the case for network coding as a unifying design paradigm for wireless networks, by describing how it addresses issues of throughput, reliability, mobility, and management. We also discuss the practical challenges facing the integration of such a design into the network stack

Cellular, Wide-Area, and Non-Terrestrial IoT: A Survey on 5G Advances and the Road Towards 6G

The next wave of wireless technologies is proliferating in connecting things among themselves as well as to humans. In the era of the Internet of things (IoT), billions of sensors, machines, vehicles, drones, and robots will be connected, making the world around us smarter. The IoT will encompass devices that must wirelessly communicate a diverse set of data gathered from the environment for myriad new applications. The ultimate goal is to extract insights from this data and develop solutions that improve quality of life and generate new revenue. Providing large-scale, long-lasting, reliable, and near real-time connectivity is the major challenge in enabling a smart connected world. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on existing and emerging communication solutions for serving IoT applications in the context of cellular, wide-area, as well as non-terrestrial networks. Specifically, wireless technology enhancements for providing IoT access in fifth-generation (5G) and beyond cellular networks, and communication networks over the unlicensed spectrum are presented. Aligned with the main key performance indicators of 5G and beyond 5G networks, we investigate solutions and standards that enable energy efficiency, reliability, low latency, and scalability (connection density) of current and future IoT networks. The solutions include grant-free access and channel coding for short-packet communications, non-orthogonal multiple access, and on-device intelligence. Further, a vision of new paradigm shifts in communication networks in the 2030s is provided, and the integration of the associated new technologies like artificial intelligence, non-terrestrial networks, and new spectra is elaborated. Finally, future research directions toward beyond 5G IoT networks are pointed out.Comment: Submitted for review to IEEE CS&

The application of network coding to multicast routing in wireless networks

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 58-62).This thesis considers the application of network coding and opportunistic routing to improve the performance of multicast flows in wireless networks. Network coding allows routers to randomly mix packets before forwarding them. This randomness ensures that routers that hear the same transmission are unlikely to forward the same packets, which permits routers to exploit wireless opportunism with minimal coordination. By mixing packets, network coding is able to reduce the number of transmissions necessary to convey packets to multiple receivers, which can lead to a large increase in throughput for multicast traffic. We discuss the design of a multicast enabled variant of MORE, a network coding based protocol for file transfer in wireless mesh networks, and evaluate this extension, which we call MORE-M, in a 20-node indoor wireless testbed. We compare MORE-M to a wireless multicast protocol that takes an approach similar to that of wired multicast by using the ETX metric to build unicast routing trees. We also compare MORE-M to a multicast enabled variant of the ExOR routing protocol. Experiments show that MORE-M's gains increase with the number of destinations, and are 35-200% greater than that of ExOR. We then consider the problem of video streaming in a wireless local area network for applications such as video conferencing. A network coding based protocol that uses opportunistic receptions at clients is proposed. We evaluate the design in our testbed and demonstrate that the use of network coding and, in particular, the use of wireless opportunism increase the quality of the video stream.by Michael Jennings.S.M

Optimization based energy-efficient control inmobile communication networks

In this work we consider how best to control mobility and transmission for the purpose of datatransfer and aggregation in a network of mobile autonomous agents. In particular we considernetworks containing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). We first consider a single link betweena mobile transmitter-receiver pair, and show that the total amount of transmittable data isbounded. For certain special, but not overly restrictive cases, we can determine closed-formexpressions for this bound, as a function of relevant mobility and communication parameters.We then use nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) to jointly optimize mobility and trans-mission schemes of all networked nodes for the purpose of minimizing the energy expenditureof the network. This yields a novel nonlinear optimal control problem for arbitrary networksof autonomous agents, which we solve with state-of-the-art nonlinear solvers. Numerical re-sults demonstrate increased network capacity and significant communication energy savingscompared to more na ̈ıve policies. All energy expenditure of an autonomous agent is due tocommunication, computation, or mobility and the actual computation of the NMPC solutionmay be a significant cost in both time and computational resources. Furthermore, frequentbroadcasting of control policies throughout the network can require significant transmit andreceive energies. Motivated by this, we develop an event-triggering scheme which accounts forthe accuracy of the optimal control solution, and provides guarantees of the minimum timebetween successive control updates. Solution accuracy should be accounted for in any triggeredNMPC scheme where the system may be run in open loop for extended times based on pos-sibly inaccurate state predictions. We use this analysis to trade-off the cost of updating ourtransmission and locomotion policies, with the frequency by which they must be updated. Thisgives a method to trade-off the computation, communication and mobility related energies ofthe mobile autonomous network.Open Acces