On the Effects of Heterogeneous Packet Lengths on Network Coding

Random linear network coding (RLNC) has been shown to provide increased throughput, security and robustness for the transmission of data through the network. Most of the analysis and the demonstrators have focused on the study of data packets with the same size (number of bytes). This constitutes a best case scenario as coded packets will incur little overhead to handle such packets. However, packet lengths are quite heterogeneous in real networks, which can cause a high overhead or, alternatively, a high delay in the transmission of data packets. As we show, this can have a severe effect on a variety of applications. This paper proposes a series of mechanisms to manage heterogeneous packet lengths and analyzes the induced overhead of those mechanisms using real packet length distributions provided by CAIDA and own measurements using video content. Our results show that an appropriate packetization of the data packets can reduce the overhead from over 100% (zero-padding packets) to below 5% for CAIDA packet distributions and that the right choice of parameters can reduce the overhead to less than 10% in the case of video data.