An algorithm of MAC-based network coding for Butterfly wireless networks

Network coding is a new technique which appeared in recent years. By employing the inherent broadcast nature of the wireless channel, it can achieve higher network throughput in wireless networks. Butterfly network model depicts the basic component unit of wireless local area networks (WLANs). In this paper, we propose an algorithm of MAC-based network coding specific to Butterfly networks - MBNC (MAC-Based Network Coding). According to the differences of numbers of the buffered packets for upstream flows in the coding node's FIFO output queue, it can increase coding opportunity as largely as possible by dynamically adjusting the contention windows of the MAC layers of upstream nodes, thus improves network performance. Performance analysis and simulation test proved that MBNC can greatly improve network throughput.