On using network coding in multi hop wireless networks

This paper studies the unfairness issues of network coding in multi hop wireless networks. Most of the work on network coding focuses on the obtained throughput gain. They show that mixing lineally the packets at the intermediate nodes is capacity-achieving. However, network coding schemes designed only to maximize the throughput could be unfairly biased. The reason is that by mixing different flows, packets destined to one destination in order to be decoded need to wait for the reception of the whole mixed set of encoded packets that may be totally independent in terms of final destination. This may lead to highly unfair delay for small block data. To mitigate this unfairness, relay nodes may mix only packets going to the same destination. We call this strategy FairMix. Although FairMix may limit the maximum attainable throughput, it aims to make distinct for decoding delay of each destination corresponding to the size of the data block. In order to investigate this trade off, we compare the FairMix performance with a naive network coding which mixes packets destined to different destinations. The simulation under lossy wireless links, limited memory and bandwidth resources, and different block sizes shows that FairMix is effective in improving fairness among destinations in comparison to naive network coding.