Redundancy-Based Delivery Mechanism for Error-Prone Wireless Networks

Network coding has attracted much attention in recent years due to the capability of transmission reduction and throughput improvement. In this paper, a redundancy-based delivery mechanism is proposed. This delivery mechanism utilizes network coding and linear combination on original packets to regenerate packets, which are called coded packets. Upon receiving a minimum number of coded packets, the destination can decode and get all original packets. Through theoretical analysis on delivery rate and overhead, we further propose an utility function to determine a proper redundancy degree and observe the suitable range of packet error rates to implement our delivery mechanism. Furthermore, the proposed delivery mechanism is applied to link adaptation. The simulation results show that by utilizing our proposed delivery, the operating SNR range of each PHY mode is lowered. In other words, when channel condition gets worse, one mobile device can still operate in the same PHY mode by utilizing the proposed delivery mechanism.