Employing Coded Relay in Multi-hop Wireless Networks

In this paper, we study Coded relay (Crelay) in multi-hop wireless networks. Crelay exploits both partial packets and overhearing capabilities of the wireless nodes, and uses Forward Error Correction code in packet forwarding. When a node overhears a partial packet from an upstream node, it informs the upstream node about the number of parity bytes needed to correct the errors, such that the upstream node need only send a small amount of parity bytes instead of the complete packet, hence improving the network efficiency. Our main contributions include the following. First, we propose an efficient network protocol that can exploit partial packets and overhearing. Second, we study the routing problem in networks with Crelay and propose a greedy algorithm for finding the paths. Third, we propose an error ratio estimator, called AMPS, that can estimate the number of byte errors in a received frame with good accuracy at a low overhead of only 8 bytes per frame, where the estimator is needed for a node to find the number of needed parity bytes. Fourth, we implement the proposed protocol and algorithm within the Click modular router, and our experiments show that Crelay can significantly improve the performance of wireless networks.