Adaptive Control of Packet Overhead in XOR Network Coding

Existing network coding schemes such as COPE require exchange of information among neighboring nodes in order to correctly encode and decode data packets. However, this leads to high packet overhead and degrades system performance more especially when network traffic is high. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new adaptive W scheme whose objective is to adaptively control waiting time of overheard packets that are stored in a buffer (called packet pool in) to achieve a tradeoff between throughput and overhead. Ns2 simulation results show that there is tremendous performance improvement in terms of throughput and overhead when adaptive W scheme is used as compared to fixed W scheme in high network traffic, densely populated network and low/high mobility environment.