BRN-051030-10

Title

• Practical Network Coding for the BRN
• Assigned to: Stephan Allner

Abstract

The Idea behind Network Coding (NC) is to mix (linear encoding) of packets at intermediate nodes. In contrast to traditional packet networks, where packets are created at the source and only transmitted (except possible fragmentation to keep constraints of the underlying network) by the network to the sink.

• What do you want to achieve? What is NOT inside the scope of your work?
• If successful, what contribution will your work make (scientific, technical)?

NC gives several possibilities of improving performance and efficiency for different types of networks and communication (broadcasts, multiple unicasts). We want to reduce the amount of necessary transmission in a broadcast area of a wireless network and by this improving energy efficiency and performance in the BRN. This implies that only packets are mixed, that are known by other nodes in the broadcast area and can be decoded at the next node. This is a simple version of mixing multiple unicast, adopted to the properties of the wireless medium.

Literature

List of standard/basic papers a person skilled in the art should have read.

Network Coding in wireless ad-hoc networks

• S. Katti, D. Katabi, Wenjun Hu, and Rahul Hariharan . "The Importance of Being Opportunistic: Practical Network Coding For Wireless Environments", In Proc. 43rd Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, Monticello, IL, Sep. 2005.
• Y. Wu, P. A. Chou, S.-Y. Kung, "Information exchange in wireless networks with network coding and physical-layer broadcast," Microsoft Technical Report, MSR-TR-2004-78, Aug. 2004

Other NC related papers, that may be interesting for other improvements

Forward Error Correction: http://blogs.bl0rg.net/netzstaub/files/galois/galois.pdf

NC for content distribution of large files

• C. Gkantsidis, P. R. Rodriguez "Network Coding for Large Scale Content Distribution", Microsoft Research Technical Report (MSR-TR-2004-80)
• Anwar Al Hamra, Chadi Barakat, and Thierry Turletti Network Coding for Wireless Mesh Networks: A Case Study

Energy-efficiant Broadcast/Multicast in wireless Ad-Hoc Networks

List of relevant conferences, standards organizations to follow up with.

For a more complete overview www.networkcoding.info may be of some service.

Competition

After starting our project, we found a similar approach taken by the COPE Projekt presented in the "The Importance of Being Opportunistic: Practical Network Coding For Wireless Environments" (see Literature under Network Coding in wireless ad-hoc networks). They seem to have some simplified assumptions and use so-called Pseudobroadcast, which is a mac-unicast, where only one receiver acks the packet and not all. This will especially become a problem in settings with poor link quality.

Personal Knowledge Base

• Description of your work / your approach
• Results so far (reports, experiments downloadable software, ...)

Project Plan: Working Packages

• List of tasks, milestones with deadlines, and deliverables

See Also

For a list of currently available thesis topics see [1]