No Arabic abstract
Multi-hop networks become popular network topologies in various emerging Internet of things applications. Batched network coding (BNC) is a solution to reliable communications in such networks with packet loss. By grouping packets into small batches and restricting recoding to the packets belonging to the same batch, BNC has a much smaller computational and storage requirements at the intermediate nodes compared with a direct application of random linear network coding. In this paper, we propose a practical recoding scheme called blockwise adaptive recoding (BAR) which learns the latest channel knowledge from short observations so that BAR can adapt to the fluctuation of channel conditions. We focus on investigating practical concerns such as the design of efficient BAR algorithms. We also design and investigate feedback schemes for BAR under imperfect feedback systems. Our numerical evaluations show that BAR has significant throughput gain for small batch size compared with the existing baseline recoding scheme. More importantly, this gain is insensitive to inaccurate channel knowledge. This encouraging result suggests that BAR is suitable to be realized in practice as the exact channel model and its parameters could be unknown and subject to change from time to time.
Batched network coding (BNC) is a low-complexity solution to network transmission in multi-hop packet networks with packet loss. BNC encodes the source data into batches of packets. As a network coding scheme, the intermediate nodes perform recoding on the received packets belonging to the same batch instead of just forwarding them. A recoding scheme that may generate more recoded packets for batches of a higher rank is also called adaptive recoding. Meanwhile, in order to combat burst packet loss, the transmission of a block of batches can be interleaved. Stream interleaving studied in literature achieves the maximum separation among any two consecutive packets of a batch, but permutes packets across blocks and hence cannot bound the buffer size and the latency. To resolve the issue of stream interleaver, we design an intrablock interleaver for adaptive recoding that can preserve the advantages of using a block interleaver when the number of recoded packets is the same for all batches. We use potential energy in classical mechanics to measure the performance of an interleaver, and propose an algorithm to optimize the interleaver with this performance measure. Our problem formulation and algorithm for intrablock interleaving are also of independent interest.
Batched network coding is a variation of random linear network coding which has low computational and storage costs. In order to adapt to random fluctuations in the number of erasures in individual batches, it is not optimal to recode and transmit the same number of packets for all batches. Different distributed optimization models, which are called adaptive recoding schemes, were formulated for this purpose. The key component of these optimization problems is the expected value of the rank distribution of a batch at the next network node, which is also known as the expected rank. In this paper, we put forth a unified adaptive recoding framework with an arbitrary recoding field size. We show that the expected rank functions are concave when the packet loss pattern is a stationary stochastic process, which covers but not limited to independent packet loss and Gilbert-Elliott packet loss model. Under this concavity assumption, we show that there always exists a solution which not only can minimize the randomness on the number of recoded packets but also can tolerate rank distribution errors due to inaccurate measurements or limited precision of the machine. We provide an algorithm to obtain such an optimal optimal solution, and propose tuning schemes that can turn any feasible solution into a desired optimal solution.
Batched network coding is a low-complexity network coding solution to feedbackless multi-hop wireless packet network transmission with packet loss. The data to be transmitted is encoded into batches where each of which consists of a few coded packets. Unlike the traditional forwarding strategy, the intermediate network nodes have to perform recoding, which generates recoded packets by network coding operations restricted within the same batch. Adaptive recoding is a technique to adapt the fluctuation of packet loss by optimizing the number of recoded packets per batch to enhance the throughput. The input rank distribution, which is a piece of information regarding the batches arriving at the node, is required to apply adaptive recoding. However, this distribution is not known in advance in practice as the incoming links channel condition may change from time to time. On the other hand, to fully utilize the potential of adaptive recoding, we need to have a good estimation of this distribution. In other words, we need to guess this distribution from a few samples so that we can apply adaptive recoding as soon as possible. In this paper, we propose a distributionally robust optimization for adaptive recoding with a small-sample inferred prediction of the input rank distribution. We develop an algorithm to efficiently solve this optimization with the support of theoretical guarantees that our optimizations performance would constitute as a confidence lower bound of the optimal throughput with high probability.
We propose a novel adaptive and causal random linear network coding (AC-RLNC) algorithm with forward error correction (FEC) for a point-to-point communication channel with delayed feedback. AC-RLNC is adaptive to the channel condition, that the algorithm estimates, and is causal, as coding depends on the particular erasure realizations, as reflected in the feedback acknowledgments. Specifically, the proposed model can learn the erasure pattern of the channel via feedback acknowledgments, and adaptively adjust its retransmission rates using a priori and posteriori algorithms. By those adjustments, AC-RLNC achieves the desired delay and throughput, and enables transmission with zero error probability. We upper bound the throughput and the mean and maximum in order delivery delay of AC-RLNC, and prove that for the point to point communication channel in the non-asymptotic regime the proposed code may achieve more than 90% of the channel capacity. To upper bound the throughput we utilize the minimum Bhattacharyya distance for the AC-RLNC code. We validate those results via simulations. We contrast the performance of AC-RLNC with the one of selective repeat (SR)-ARQ, which is causal but not adaptive, and is a posteriori. Via a study on experimentally obtained commercial traces, we demonstrate that a protocol based on AC-RLNC can, vis-`a-vis SR-ARQ, double the throughput gains, and triple the gain in terms of mean in order delivery delay when the channel is bursty. Furthermore, the difference between the maximum and mean in order delivery delay is much smaller than that of SR-ARQ. Closing the delay gap along with boosting the throughput is very promising for enabling ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) applications.
We consider communication over a noisy network under randomized linear network coding. Possible error mechanism include node- or link- failures, Byzantine behavior of nodes, or an over-estimate of the network min-cut. Building on the work of Koetter and Kschischang, we introduce a probabilistic model for errors. We compute the capacity of this channel and we define an error-correction scheme based on random sparse graphs and a low-complexity decoding algorithm. By optimizing over the code degree profile, we show that this construction achieves the channel capacity in complexity which is jointly quadratic in the number of coded information bits and sublogarithmic in the error probability.