CCACK: Efficient Network Coding Based Opportunistic Routing Through Cumulative Coded Acknowledgments
Abstract
The use of random linear network coding (NC) has significantly simplified the design of opportunistic routing (OR) protocols by removing the need of coordination among forwarding nodes for avoiding duplicate transmissions. However, NC-based OR protocols face a new challenge: How many coded packets should each forwarder transmit? To avoid the overhead of feedback exchange, most practical existing NC-based OR protocols compute offline the expected number of transmissions for each forwarder using heuristics based on periodic measurements of the average link loss rates and the ETX metric. Although attractive due to their minimal coordination overhead, these approaches may suffer significant performance degradation in dynamic wireless environments with continuously changing levels of channel gains, interference, and background traffic.
In this paper, we propose CCACK, a new efficient NC-based OR protocol. CCACK exploits a novel Cumulative Coded ACKnowledgment scheme that allows nodes to acknowledge network coded traffic to their upstream nodes in a simple way, oblivious to loss rates, and with practically zero overhead. In addition, the cumulative coded acknowledgment scheme in CCACK enables an efficient credit-based, rate control algorithm. Our experiments on a 22-node 802.11 WMN testbed show that compared to MORE, a state-of-the-art NC based OR protocol, CCACK improves both throughput and fairness, by up to 3.2x and 83%, respectively, with average improvements of 11- 36% and 5.7-8.3%, respectively, for different numbers of concurrent flows. Our extensive simulations show that the gains are actually much higher in large networks, with longer routing paths between sources and destinations.
Date of this Version
12-2009