Reliability-Based Rate Allocation in Wireless Inter-Session Network Coding Systems

Network coding has recently received increasing attention to improve performance and increase capacity in both wired and wireless communication networks. In this paper, we focus on inter-session network coding, where multiple unicast sessions jointly participate in network coding. Wireless links are often unreliable because of varying channel conditions. We consider multi-hop unicast sessions over unreliable links and propose a distributed end-to-end transmission rate adjustment mechanism to maximize the aggregate network utility by taking into account the wireless link reliability information. This includes an elaborate modeling of end-to-end reliability. Simulation results show that by taking into account the reliability information, we can increase the network throughput by up to 100% for some network topologies. We can also increase the aggregate network utility significantly for various choices of utility functions.