Towards Effective Intra-flow Network Coding in Software DefinedWireless Mesh Networks

Donghai Zhu, Xinyu Yang Yang, Peng Zhao, Wei Yu
2016 EAI Endorsed Transactions on Wireless Spectrum  
Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have potential to provide convenient broadband wireless Internet access to mobile users. With the support of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm that separates control plane and data plane, WMNs can be easily deployed and managed. In addition, by exploiting the broadcast nature of the wireless medium and the spatial diversity of multi-hop wireless networks, intra-flow network coding has shown a greater benefit in comparison with traditional routing paradigms
more » ... in data transmission for WMNs. In this paper, we develop a novel OpenCoding protocol, which combines the SDN technique with intra-flow network coding for WMNs. Our developed protocol can simplify the deployment and management of the network and improve network performance. In OpenCoding, a controller that works on the control plane makes routing decisions for mesh routers and the hop-by-hop forwarding function is replaced by network coding functions in data plane. We analyze the overhead of OpenCoding. Through a simulation study, we show the effectiveness of the OpenCoding protocol in comparison with existing schemes. Our data shows that OpenCoding outperforms both traditional routing and intra-flow network coding schemes. EAI Endorsed Transactions on Wireless Spectrum 12 2015 -01 2016 | Volume 2 | Issue 7 | e2 D. Zhu et al. Meanwhile, another challenge in establishing WMNs is to achieve a high network performance despite the unreliable and lossy wireless communication channels. The inherent broadcast nature of wireless communication channels can be exploited to improve network performance. Network coding [7] is one mechanism, which makes use of the broadcast nature in wireless networks. For example, by integrating intraflow random linear network coding that enables relay nodes to combine information content in packets before forwarding and performing opportunistic routing [8], the MORE protocol [9] has demonstrated that network coding can improve network throughput significantly and can be extended to support applications, including data distribution in peer-to-peer networks [10], etc. As we can see, the SDN technology and network coding scheme are two different techniques to address different challenges in WMNs. Again, the key idea of SDN is to keep routers or switches simple, while moving the control function into the control server deployed in the network. The intra-flow network coding scheme can achieve much better performance than hopby-hop forwarding schemes because of leveraging the nature of the wireless broadcast medium. Therefore, one research problem is raised: How can we integrate the SDN and intra-flow network coding schemes to make that the integrated scheme performs better than the individual ones? To answer this question, in this paper we make the following contributions.
doi:10.4108/eai.19-1-2016.150998 fatcat:z24knepnuvc3hbydtfui7si5ei