Network coding design for 5G-compatible IoT gateways

Abstract

In wireless communications, packet loss may easily happen due to any kinds of unexpected factors and conditions, such as weather, physical blockage, radio frequency interference (RFI), and equipment failure. If excessive packet loss persists, it may contribute to a reduction in the reliability of communications, and hence the lower quality of network services. The issue is especially critical to instant services such as streaming video or surveillance recording. Under the circumstances, packet retransmission is one of the direct and common practices to recover the dropped packets and reduce the packet loss rate. However, it is considered a lack of efficiency because retransmission requires uplink and downlink interaction, which potentially increases time delay in the whole packet transmission cycle. In response to the aforementioned concerns, the multiple path protection scheme is the feasible mechanism to maximally reduce the packet loss rate. For instance, '1+1' and '2+1' are two feasible schemes introduced in this year-long project. This report presents the use case of the aforementioned network coding schemes and demonstrates the experiment results based on the Markov simulation model and the configuration of a real Raspberry Pi network. After the comparison of the performance of packet transmission with and without the network coding schemes, the relationship between the network capacity, link failure rate, as well as traffic throughput will be further discussed. Ultimately, we found that the packet loss rate can maximally decrease by 97%.