Performance modeling of network coding in epidemic routing

Abstract

Epidemic routing has been proposed to reduce the data transmission delay in opportunistic networks, in which data can be either replicated or network coded along the opportunistic multiple paths. In this paper, we introduce an analytical framework to study the performance of network coding based epidemic routing, in comparison with replication based epidemic routing. With extensive simulations, we show that our model successfully characterizes these two protocols and demonstrates the superiority of network coding in opportunistic networks when bandwidth and node buffers are limited. We then propose a priority variant of the network coding based protocol, which has the salient feature that the destination can decode a high priority sub-set of the data much earlier than it can decode any data without the priority scheme. Our analytical results provide insights into how network coding based epidemic routing with priority can reduce the data transmission delay while inducing low overhead.