XORs in the Air: Practical Wireless Network Coding

By Sachin Rajsekhar Katti, Hariharan Rahul, Wenjun Hu, Dina Katabi, Muriel Médard, Jon Crowcroft. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 2006

2,819 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper proposes COPE, a new architecture for wireless mesh networks. In addition to forwarding packets, routers mix (i.e., code) packets from different sources to increase the information content of each transmission. We show that intelligently mixing packets increases network throughput. Our design is rooted in the theory of network coding. Prior work on network coding is mainly theoretical and focuses on multicast traffic. This paper aims to bridge theory with practice; it addresses the common case of unicast traffic, dynamic and potentially bursty flows, and practical issues facing the integration of network coding in the current network stack. We evaluate our design on a 20-node wireless network, and discuss the results of the first testbed deployment of wireless network coding. The results show that using COPE at the forwarding layer, without modifying routing and higher layers, increases network throughput. The gains vary from a few percent to several folds depending on the traffic pattern, congestion level, and transport protocol.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a1b7a36e9a1f499742f8cd14f366c597ff039071

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Citations in the corpus

Optimized constellations for two-way wireless relaying with physical network coding (2009, methodology): “The DF scheme has been applied to a larger network scenario and real–life protocols in [7, 8].”
Enabling Practical Backscatter Communication for On-body Sensors (2016, methodology): “Other recent work use signal processing techniques over the analog signal to minimize interference [17, 18, 21, 29, 33].”
A Review of Information Dissemination Protocols for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (2012, methodology): “1) COPE: A network coding-based protocol, called COPE, is introduced in [37].”
Mobile Cloud Computing: A Survey, State of Art and Future Directions (2013, background): “What is the effect of using these techniques on power consumption and billing service (considering 3G/4G and cloud pricing model)? What is the effect of user mobility on the system performance? – Network coding [59] approaches that fuse data packets together to increase the throughput and efficiency”
Resilient Network Coding in the Presence of Byzantine Adversaries (2008, neutral): “Researchers have extended the above results to a variety of areas including wireless networks [25], [17], [18], energy [28], secrecy [2], content distribution [8], and distributed storage [16].”
Interference Alignment: A New Look at Signal Dimensions in a Communication Network (2011, background): “Two-way communication with the help of one or more relay nodes is a topic that has recently drawn much attention [4, 11, 28, 76, 77, 87, 121, 122, 129].”
Four-Bit Wireless Link Estimation (2007, background): “We present a link estimator design with these interfaces that reduces packet delivery costs by up to 44% over current approaches and maintains a 99% delivery ratio over large, multihop testbeds.”
Physical Network Coding in Two-Way Wireless Relay Channels (2007, background): “The network coding can offer performance improvement in the wireless networks for two–way (or multi–way) communication flows [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9].”
Joint Physical Layer Coding and Network Coding for Bidirectional Relaying (2008, background): “, which is higher than that achievable with the pure network coding scheme in [2] for high SNRs.”
Achieving single channel, full duplex wireless communication (2010, methodology): “Another work, COPE, uses XORs of packets for reducing congestion in wireless routing [12].”
In-Band Full-Duplex Wireless: Challenges and Opportunities (2013, background): “In addition, the system throughput may benefit by letting terminals en route jointly process bidirectional flows, perhaps also by leveraging network coding techniques [130]–[132].”
Wireless Broadcast Using Network Coding (2009, background): “1(a), without network coding, node R simply relays packet a from R1 to R2 and packet b from R2 to R1.”
Symbol-level network coding for wireless mesh networks (2008, background): “MIXIT builds on prior work on opportunistic routing [1, 2], cooperative spatial diversity [18, 14], and wireless network coding [11].”