SYMBOL-BASED INTERFLOW NETWORK CODING FOR WIRELESS NETWORKS

Abstract

We investigate the problem of reliable unicast transmissions in wireless ad hoc and WLAN/WiMAX networks. Currently, approaches using network coding show several-fold gain in term of bandwidth efficiency over the traditional technique, "store and forward". However, most of these approaches have assumed that aU the information flows have the same packet size, while the other's consider h'ansmission flows with different size packets, then overcome the size-difference issue by padding more dummy data into the smallerize packets. In our approach, by exploiting the size differences of packets on different flows, we introduce a new technique at the relay node/access point base station to improve network bandwidth efficiency. In particular, a symbol-adjusted technique has been proposed in creating coded packets to improve the reliability of transmissions. Both analytical and imulation results show that the proposed technique significantly improves the network performance over the current technique.