On Practical Network Coding for Wireless Environments

In this extended abstract, we briefly describe COPE, an opportunistic approach to network coding that provides orders of magnitudes improvement in the throughput of dense wireless mesh networks. COPE supports multiple unicast flows, deals with bursty and unknown demands, and is simple and easy to deploy. Our COPE prototype provides the first implementation of network coding in the wireless environment. It shows the supremacy of opportunistic network coding over current wireless implementations