Network coding for cooperative mobile devices with multiple interfaces

Cooperation among mobile devices and utilizing multiple interfaces such as cellular and local area links simultaneously are promising to meet the increasing throughput demand over cellular links. In particular, when mobile devices are in the close proximity of each other and are interested in the same content, device-to-device connections such as WiFi-Direct, in addition to cellular links, can be utilized to construct a cooperative system. However, it is crucial to understand the potential of network coding for cooperating mobile devices with multiple interfaces. In this paper, we consider this problem, and (i) develop network coding schemes for cooperative mobile devices with multiple interfaces, and (ii) characterize the performance of network coding by using the number of transmissions to recover all packets as a performance metric.