Source and network coding on mobile devices

Abstract

This project concerns the development and implementation of a full functional demonstrator for cooperative wireless networking and network coding, which is a technology for improving performance in wireless networks. An application for distribute a video among nodes forming a cooperative cluster is implemented. The implementation is done for the Maemo platform. In Cellular Controlled Peer-to-Peer (CCP2P) networks, besides being connected to an outside world using cellular links, a group of mobile devices in close proximity form a cooperative cluster contributing their onboard capabilities and resources to exploit them a more efficient way. This project implements this kind of networks. Diverse cooperating phones agree on splitting a video to download and start to receive it through USB from a server (simulating the cellular link). Simultaneously the received data is exchanged over the short-range link using three different transmission schemes: Network coding and broadcast, which were implemented in a previous work, and a new hybrid schema developed as a combination of both, broadcast and network coding. After implementation of the program, tests are carried out, to see the results achieved with this new schema and compare it with the previous ones, in terms of throughput, energy consumption and necessary time to distribute the whole video. The results obtained show an improvement in the three cases for the new hybrid schema, which use broadcast at the beginning, when all the nodes are interested in all the packets, and Network Coding for retransmissions of packets.