Impact of traffic pattern on benefits of practical Multi-hop Network Coding in wireless networks

In the pioneering works, network coding has shown great potential to improve the performance of wireless networks. However, most of them are implemented under specific traffic pattern. Since various traffic patterns will affect the promising gains of network coding, in this paper, we study how traffic pattern affects the benefits of general practical network coding scheme-Multi-hop Network Coding (MNC) in wireless networks. First, we analyze the idiosyncratic properties of MNC and raise two practical issues of MNC neglected before: iteration coding and path division. Subsequently, we put forward traffic factors to describe some characteristics of realistic traffic flows, and then qualitatively analyze the relations between the traffic factors and the gains of MNC. In addition, throughput boundary with MNC is formulated in the perspective of flows. Our evaluation also shows that particular MNC should be applied according to different traffic patterns to maximize network throughput and reduce the systematic overhead.