The Benefits of Network Coding over a Wireless Backbone

Network coding is a promising technology that can effectively improve the efficiency and capacity of multihop wireless networks by exploiting the broadcast nature of the wireless medium. However, current packet routing schemes do not take advantage of the network coding, and the benefits of network coding have not been fully utilized. To improve the performance gain of network coding, in this paper, we apply network coding over a wireless backbone and investigate the performance of this approach from a theoretical perspective. Our analysis shows that, compared to network coding over ad hoc networks with traditional routing schemes, network coding over the backbone structure exhibits significant advantages. This is because all packets are transmitted over the constructed backbone with pre-specified routes, and consequently the opportunity for coding packets at intermediate nodes can be substantially improved. To further enhance the performance, we also present an optimized link scheduling protocol for network coding over a wireless backbone. The performance results show that with proposed approach, the coding gain can achieve the theoretical bound in some scenarios.