Random Linear Network Coding For Time Division Duplexing: When To Stop Talking And Start Listening

A new random linear network coding scheme for reliable communications for time division duplexing channels is proposed. The setup assumes a packet erasure channel and that nodes cannot transmit and receive information simultaneously. The sender transmits coded data packets back-to-back before stopping to wait for the receiver to acknowledge (ACK) the number of degrees of freedom, if any, that are required to decode correctly the information. We provide an analysis of this problem to show that there is an optimal number of coded data packets, in terms of mean completion time, to be sent before stopping to listen. This number depends on the latency, probabilities of packet erasure and ACK erasure, and the number of degrees of freedom that the receiver requires to decode the data. This scheme is optimal in terms of the mean time to complete the transmission of a fixed number of data packets. We show that its performance is very close to that of a full duplex system, while transmitting a different number of coded packets can cause large degradation in performance, especially if latency is high. Also, we study the throughput performance of our scheme and compare it to existing half-duplex Go-back-N and Selective Repeat ARQ schemes. Numerical results, obtained for different latencies, show that our scheme has similar performance to the Selective Repeat in most cases and considerable performance gain when latency and packet error probability is high.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures, Submitted to INFOCOM'0

On modelling network coded ARQ-based channels

Network coding (NC) has been an attractive research topic in recent years as a means of offering a throughput improvement, especially in multicast scenarios. The throughput gain is achieved by introducing an algebraic method for combining multiple input streams of packets which are addressing one output port at an intermediate node. We present a practical implementation of network coding in conjunction with error control schemes, namely the Stop-and-Wait (SW) and Selective Repeat (SR) protocols. We propose a modified NC scheme and apply it at an intermediate SW ARQ-based link to reduce ARQ control signals at each transmission. We further extend this work to investigate the usefulness of NC in the Butterfly multicast network which adopts the SR ARQ protocol as an error control scheme. We validate our throughput analysis using a relatively recent discrete-event simulator, SimEvents®. The results show that the proposed scheme offers a throughput advantage of at least 50% over traditional SW ARQ, and that this is particularly noticeable in the presence of high error rates. In the multicast network, however, simulation results show that when compared with the traditional scheme, NC-SR ARQ can achieve a throughput gain of between 2% and 96% in a low bandwidth channel and up to 19% in a high bandwidth channel with errors

Performance of cognitive stop-and-wait hybrid automatic repeat request in the face of imperfect sensing

The cognitive radio (CR) paradigm has the potential of improving the exploitation of the electromagnetic spectrum by detecting instantaneously unoccupied spectrum slots allocated to primary users (PUs). In order to support the process of spectrum reuse, we consider a CR scheme, which senses and opportunistically accesses a PU's spectrum for communication between a pair of nodes relying on the stop-and-wait hybrid automatic repeat request (SW-HARQ) protocol. This arrangement is represented by the cognitive SW-HARQ (CSW-HARQ), where the availability/unavailability of the PU's channel is modeled as a two-state Markov chain having OFF and ON states, respectively. Once the cognitive user (CU) finds that the PU's channel is available (i.e., in the OFF state), the CU transmits data over the PU channel's spectrum, while relying on the principles of SW-HARQ. We investigate both the throughput and the delay of CSW-HARQ, with a special emphasis on the impact of the various system parameters involved in the scenarios of both perfect and imperfect spectrum sensing. Furthermore, we analyze both the throughput as well as the average packet delay and end-to-end packet delay of the CSW-HARQ system. We propose a pair of analytical approaches: 1) the probability-based and 2) the discrete time Markov chain-based. Closed-form expressions are derived for both the throughput and the delay under the perfect and imperfect sensing environments that are validated by simulation. We demonstrate that the activity of PUs, the transmission reliability of the CU, and the sensing environment have a significant impact on both the throughput and the delay of the CR system

Application of hybrid ARQ to controller area networks

This thesis proposes two types of Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (HARQ) schemes for the Controller Area Network (CAN) to combat Electro-Magnetic Interference (EMI) and improve network efficiency. The proposed HARQ schemes encode the original CAN data frames by a Reed-Solomon (R-S) code so that burst errors due to EMI may be corrected at the receive nodes. Therefore, the probability of error frames is reduced, thereby reducing the probability of retransmission. Hence, the network efficiency of the system is improved --Abstract, page iii

Random Linear Network Coding For Time Division Duplexing: Energy Analysis

We study the energy performance of random linear network coding for time division duplexing channels. We assume a packet erasure channel with nodes that cannot transmit and receive information simultaneously. The sender transmits coded data packets back-to-back before stopping to wait for the receiver to acknowledge the number of degrees of freedom, if any, that are required to decode correctly the information. Our analysis shows that, in terms of mean energy consumed, there is an optimal number of coded data packets to send before stopping to listen. This number depends on the energy needed to transmit each coded packet and the acknowledgment (ACK), probabilities of packet and ACK erasure, and the number of degrees of freedom that the receiver requires to decode the data. We show that its energy performance is superior to that of a full-duplex system. We also study the performance of our scheme when the number of coded packets is chosen to minimize the mean time to complete transmission as in [1]. Energy performance under this optimization criterion is found to be close to optimal, thus providing a good trade-off between energy and time required to complete transmissions.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures, Accepted to ICC 200