Network Coding for Hop-by-Hop Communication Enhancement in Multi-hop Networks

In our recent study, we introduced the PlayNCool protocol that increases the
throughput of the wireless networks by enabling a helper node to strengthen
the communication link between two neighboring nodes and using random
linear network coding. This paper focuses on design and implementation
advantages of the PlayNCool protocol in a real environment of wireless mesh
networks. We provide a detailed protocol to implement PlayNCool that
is independent from the other protocols in the current computer network
stack. PlayNCool performance is evaluated using NS{3 simulations and real-
life measurements using Aalborg University's Raspberry Pi test-bed. Our
results show that selecting the best policy to activate the helper node is a
key to guarantee the performance of PlayNCool protocol. We also study the
effect of neighbor nodes in the performance of PlayNCool. Using a helper
in presence of active neighbors is useful even if the channel from helper to
destination is not better than the channel between sender and destination.
PlayNCool increases the gain of end-to-end communication by two-fold or
more while maintaining compatibility to standard wireless ad-hoc routing
protocols.