Flying against lossy light-load hybrid networks

Emerging as an important potential approach to the operation of lossy communication networks, Network Coding (NC) has been proposed to combine with TCP called TCP-NC by MIT. However, the key parameter R that is brought in for sending redundant packets against random loss is preseted and stays constant, therefore, chances are that it may fail to work. In this paper, we proposed a dynamic redundancy algorithm to control the number of sending packets. The algorithm is executed at the time of every arrival of feedback and makes redundancy approximate the loss rate as much as possible. All of these is done by the sender who is completely unconscious of the network situation. Simulation results under hybrid networks show that our new protocol retains all the advantages of TCP-NC over TCP-Reno and TCP-Westwood in terms of channel utilization and overall throughput, and simultaneously outperforms TCP-NC in time-varying light-load hybrid networks.