| Summary: | This dissertation examines the design and application of network coding (NC)
strategies to enhance the performance of communication networks. With its ability to
combine information packets from different, previously independent data flows, NC
has the potential to improve the throughput, reduce delay and increase the power
efficiency of communication systems in ways that have not yet been fully utilized
given the current lack of processing power at relay nodes. With these motivations in
mind, this dissertation presents three main contributions that employ NC to improve
the efficiency of practical communication systems.
First, the integration of NC and erasure coding (EC) is presented in the context
of wired networks. While the throughput gains from utilizing NC have been demonstrated, and EC has been shown to be an efficient means of reducing packet loss, these have generally been done independently. This dissertation presents innovative methods to combine these two techniques through cross-layer design methodologies.
Second, three methods to reduce or limit the delay introduced by NC when deployed
in networks with asynchronous traffic are developed. Also, a novel opportunistic
approach of applying EC for improved data reliability is designed to take advantage
of unused opportunities introduced by the delay reduction methods proposed.
Finally, computationally efficient methods for the selection of relay nodes and the
assignment of transmit power values to minimize the total transmit power consumed
in cooperative relay networks with NC are developed. Adaptive power allocation is
utilized to control the formation of the network topology to maximize the efficiency
of the NC algorithm.
This dissertation advances the efficient deployment of NC through its integration
with other algorithms and techniques in cooperative communication systems within
the framework of cross-layer protocol design. The motivation is that to improve
the performance of communication systems, relay nodes will need to perform more
intelligent processing of data units than traditional routing. The results presented in
this work are applicable to both wireless and wired networks with real-time traffic
which exist in such systems ranging from cellular and ad-hoc networks to fixed optical
networks.
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