Lean and Mean: Network Coding for Commercial Devices

With its ability to reduce the number of transmissions in lossy networks as well
as its potential to simplify the design and required signaling of
communication protocols, network coding has emerged as an attractive
solution to harness the power of wireless and cooperative networks in order to
provide higher throughput and lower energy expenditure. This
article shows that network coding's complexity is not an issue for
current mobile devices even without hardware acceleration. We
provide real--life measurements of energy savings gains of two design
styles of network coding, namely, inter-- and intra--session network
coding using commercial platforms, including Open--Mesh routers and
various mobile phones. We demonstrate that the energy per bit
invested in coding/decoding operations can be several orders of
magnitude smaller than that used for transmission/reception,
while also maintaining processing speeds as high as several hundreds
of Mbps or even several Gbps depending on the device and coding
configuration used.