Practical Sliding Window Recoder: Design, Analysis, and Usecases

Network coding has been widely used as a technology to ensure efficient and reliable communication. The ability to recode packets at the intermediate nodes is a major benefit of network coding implementations. This allows the intermediate nodes to choose a different code rate and fine-tune the outgoing transmission to the channel conditions, decoupling the requirement for the source node to compensate for cumulative losses over a multi-hop network. Block network coding solutions already have practical recoders but an on-the-fly recoder for sliding window network coding has not been studied in detail. In this paper, we present the implementation details of a practical recoder for sliding window network coding for the first time along with a comprehensive performance analysis of a multi-hop network using the recoder. The sliding window recoder ensures that the network performs closest to its capacity and that each node can use its outgoing links efficiently.