On analyzing and improving COPE performance

COPE is a new architecture for unicasts in wireless mesh networks that employs opportunistic network coding to improve total throughput. Katti et al. showed through experiments that this system significantly improves the throughput of wireless networks with UDP traffic, and several attempts have been made to analyze the COPE performance. However, they are not completely satisfactory. In this paper, we give a new analysis of COPE, and argue that the key to COPE's success lies in the interaction between COPE and the MAC protocol. The local fairness enforced by the MAC protocol among competing nodes play an important role here. Based on the analysis, we also propose a simple modification to the COPE system that can further improve the network throughput.