Early Release: Reduce Buffering Overhead of Practical Network Coding with Routing Information

In network coding applications over packet networks, the intermediate nodes have to buffer incoming packets for encoding as they arrive asynchronously. In common buffering models, all of the buffered packets within current generation are not flushed until the generation expires, which causes unnecessary buffering overhead. In this paper, we show that some of the buffered packets can be released as coded packets are sent out. We propose a scheduling algorithm which refers to local routing information to decide when to release buffered packets, and implement the algorithm as an add-on to two typical buffering models. Simulation results show that our scheme can reduce about 50% buffer consumption, and only suffered a throughput loss less than 5% optimal throughput. Meanwhile, as less packets are involved in the encoding process, we also observe a reduction of 30% ~ 55% on encoding overhead.