TCP VON: Joint congestion control and online network coding for wireless networks

In this paper, we propose TCP Vegas with online network coding (TCP VON), which incorporates online network coding into TCP. It is shown that the use of online network coding in transport layer can improve the throughput and reliability of the end-to-end communication. Compared to generation based network coding, in online network coding, packets can be decoded consecutively instead of generation by generation. Thus, online network coding incurs a low decoding delay. In TCP VON, the sender transmits redundant coded packets when it detects packet losses from acknowledgement. Otherwise, it transmits innovative coded packets. We establish a Markov chain to analytically model the average decoding delay of TCP VON. We also conduct ns-2 simulations to validate the proposed analytical model. Finally, we compare the delay and throughput performance of TCP VON and automatic repeat request (ARQ) network coding based TCP (TCP ARQNC). Simulation results show that TCP VON outperforms TCP ARQNC in terms of the average decoding delay and network throughput.