Sharing the Pi:Testbed Description and Performance Evaluation of Network Coding on the Raspberry Pi

Abstract

Abstract—This paper presents the design and performanceevaluation of an inexpensive testbed for network coding protocolscomposed of Raspberry Pis. First, we show the performance ofrandom linear network coding primitives on the Raspberry Piin terms of processing speed and energy consumption under avariety of configuration setups. Our measurements show thatprocessing rates of up to 230 Mbps are possible with theRaspberry Pi. Also, the energy consumption per bit can beas small as 3 nJ/bit, which is several orders of magnitudesmaller than the transmission/reception energy use. Surprisingly,overclocking the Raspberry Pi from 700 MHz to 1000 MHznot only produces an increase in processing speed of up to68 % for large generation sizes, but also provides a reduction of64 % in the processing energy per bit for most tested scenarios.Then, we show Raspberry Pi as an inexpensive, viable, andflexible platform to deploy large research networking testbedsfor the evaluation of network coding protocols. We propose keyparameters and representations to evaluate protocol performancein network nodes as well as validating the testbed’s statistics usingthe case of a one–hop broadcast with random linear networkcoding, which is well understood in theor