Trickle Irrigation: Congestion Relief for Communication With Network Coding

Network coding schemes have recently been used for error control when communicating over lossy channels. However, there does not exist congestion control mechanisms in the literature that are specifically tailored for these coding techniques. This paper, for the first time, proposes Trickle, a lightweight and practical congestion control framework that is customized to meet the needs of coding. Trickle is designed based on the principle of back pressure, and maintains a novel triple-node indexed queueing structure at each node. As compared to existing back pressure protocols with perdestination or perlink queues, Trickle uses significantly fewer queues, and is thus more scalable to larger networks. Our experimental results have shown that Trickle achieves much higher throughput than IEEE 802.11b for fountain codes, network coding, as well as noncoded TCP in multihop wireless networks.