Rate Control for Network-Coded Multipath Relaying with Time-Varying Connectivity

This paper presents techniques for achieving high throughput in delay-constrained, multihop wireless communication networks with time-varying link connectivity. We develop a rate-controlled, multipath strategy using network coding, and compare its performance with that of multipath flooding and with the performance of traditional single-path strategies. These performance comparisons include both theoretical benchmarks and simulation results from cooperative relay scenarios, which incorporate different sets of link connectivity statistics that are drawn from field tests of mobile satellite communication terminals. The results indicate that with appropriate rate-control, network coding can provide throughput performance comparable to multipath flooding of the network while utilizing bandwidth nearly as efficiently as single-path routing.