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A Network Coding Scheme to Improve Throughput for IEEE 802.11 WLAN

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Abstract

In IEEE 802.11 infrastructure wireless local area network (WLAN), the communication between any two nodes is relayed by an access point (AP), which becomes the bottleneck of WLAN and severely restricts the overall throughput. It is well known that network coding technique is able to greatly improve the throughput of wireless networks. But, the available coding schemes do not make full advantage of channel capacity due to the fact that they pick at most one packet from each data flow for coding and the picked packets may have a great difference in packet size, wasting some channel capacity. To remedy the problem, in this paper, we propose the coding scheme that combines multiple buffered packets in one flow into a larger packet for coding so that the packets participating in coding have close sizes. We formulate an integer programming problem to find the optimal packet coding, which is solved by an optimal algorithm with relative high time complexity together with a heuristic algorithm with relative low time complexity. Simulation results show that the proposed coding scheme is able to greatly improve the throughput of WLAN and the throughput gain increases with the growth of the number of coding flows.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61472367, 61432015, and 61379124), the Ph.D. Programs Foundation of Ministry of Education of China (No. 20123317110002), the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province, China (No. LY13F020025), and the Project-sponsored by SRF for ROCS, SEM of China.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China, 310023

    Kaikai Chi, Yi-hua Zhu & Yongchao Wu

  2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada

    Victor C. M. Leung

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  1. Kaikai Chi
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  2. Yi-hua Zhu
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  3. Yongchao Wu
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  4. Victor C. M. Leung
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Correspondence to Yi-hua Zhu.

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Chi, K., Zhu, Yh., Wu, Y. et al. A Network Coding Scheme to Improve Throughput for IEEE 802.11 WLAN. Mobile Netw Appl 21, 425–435 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-015-0634-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-015-0634-z

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