A Network Coding Scheme for Seamless Interaction with TCP

There has been extensive work that relies on network coding to increase the resiliency to errors and consequently improve the performance of wireless networks. However, due to the coding operations, these network coding techniques often introduce an additional delay that has a negative impact on TCP traffic. A recent approach, namely online coding, proposes a feedback mechanism for TCP that acknowledges the rate of receiving innovative linear combinations instead of the decoding rate. However, this approach requires modifying the TCP protocol, which raises a concern with the feasibility of implementing such a mechanism in practice. In this paper we propose a network coding scheme, based on the use of generations in conjunction with triangular coefficient matrices, which interacts well with TCP, even if the sender has knowledge only on the decoding rate. We compare our scheme with existing state-of-the-art, square matrix coding and online coding (with feedback on innovative rate and with feedback on decoding rate) and show through simulations that our scheme outperforms square matrix coding and online coding with feedback on decoding rate. Moreover, our scheme achieves a higher throughput than online coding with feedback on innovative rate when the communication occurs over multiple hops, in extremely volatile environments.