ARSM: A Lightweight Packet Reception Notification Mechanism for Wireless Localized Network Coding

Localized network coding can greatly improve the throughput of wireless mesh networks. In a typical practical wireless transmission mechanism using localized network coding, such as COPE, to make decision which forwarding packets should be coded together, each node needs to broadcast a notification message every τ interval time to inform their neighbors which packets they have buffered currently. However, the τ-interval-notification mechanism will incur non-negligible overhead, especially when τ is small, and it is difficult to determine the value of τ due to the unbalanced network payload. In this paper, we analyzed the overhead of the τ-interval-notification mechanism, and proposed a novel lightweight reception-report-notification mechanism, named ARSM, for localized network coding, in which a node will be triggered to send notification of reception reports when it has buffered k new packets, and each notification will include information of 2k latest buffered packets to decrease the message size of the notification and guarantee the coding efficiency meanwhile. Simulation results show that ARSM can achieve higher coding efficiency with less overhead, and a coding aware transmission mechanism based on ARSM will achieve a higher throughput than the one based on the τ-interval-notification mechanism.