Sharing the Pi: Testbed Description and Performance Evaluation of Network Coding on the Raspberry Pi

Abstract—This paper presents the design and performance
evaluation of an inexpensive testbed for network coding protocols
composed of Raspberry Pis. First, we show the performance of
random linear network coding primitives on the Raspberry Pi
in terms of processing speed and energy consumption under a
variety of configuration setups. Our measurements show that
processing rates of up to 230 Mbps are possible with the
Raspberry Pi. Also, the energy consumption per bit can be
as small as 3 nJ/bit, which is several orders of magnitude
smaller than the transmission/reception energy use. Surprisingly,
overclocking the Raspberry Pi from 700 MHz to 1000 MHz
not only produces an increase in processing speed of up to
68 % for large generation sizes, but also provides a reduction of
64 % in the processing energy per bit for most tested scenarios.
Then, we show Raspberry Pi as an inexpensive, viable, and
flexible platform to deploy large research networking testbeds
for the evaluation of network coding protocols. We propose key
parameters and representations to evaluate protocol performance
in network nodes as well as validating the testbed’s statistics using
the case of a one–hop broadcast with random linear network
coding, which is well understood in theory