A case study of: Sender transmission reliability and complexity using network coding with multi-generation mixing

Improvements in emerging practical network coding methods, such as multi-generation Mixing (MGM), can be attributed to two arguably independent factors: (1) An intrinsic factor that is due to the cooperation among intermediate (propagating) nodes in mixing traffic received through multiple routing paths. (2) An extrinsic factor that is due to the level of reliability provided by network coding from the sender toward the intermediate nodes. The vast majority of prior work has primarily focused on the intrinsic factor, while the impact of reliability of sender transmission toward the network (extrinsic factor of network coding) has not been largely investigated. In this paper we evaluate the performance of network coding with MGM in improving the reliability of sender transmission. Since MGM is a generalized approach for practical network coding, we adopt MGM for conducting this study. Using different loss models and through extensive simulations we evaluate the performance of MGM as well as traditional generation based NC (a special case of MGM) and their ability in reliably transmitting sender packets.