Decoding Buffer Management in Practical Wireless Network Coding

In a practical wireless network, the coding opportunities may be reduced by limited decoding buffers. In this paper, we introduce a new scheme called decoding buffer management (DBM) in practical wireless network coding. The DBM is composed of two parts named respectively decoding buffer filtering and packet information distributing. By decoding buffer filtering, the packets invaluable for future coding/decoding are filtered instead of storing in decoding buffer. Meanwhile, through packet information distributing, the overhead brought by packet information announcing is further reduced. We evaluate the proposed scheme on a regular 4×4 grid wireless network. Comparing with COPE, the simulation results show that when decoding buffers are limited, the DBM has up to 6.7 times coding opportunities while the amount of the packets stored in decoding buffers is reduced by up to 88% and the amount for packet information announcing is reduced by over 95%.