Weighted partial network coding and its applications in wireless mesh networks

Network coding (NC) has showed to be beneficial to improve transmission performance in wireless mesh networks. Random linear coding is usually applied as the default coding schema. However, random linear coding causes significant decoding delay and jitter at receiver. Further, current NC does not support weight assignment to original packets, which is however indispensable for popular applications such as quality of service control and multipath media streaming in wireless mesh networks. Partial network coding (PNC) can largely reduce decoding delay and receiving fluctuation while keeping the benefit of NC. However, PNC does not support weight-based data replacement and weight assignment to original packets. In this work, we propose weighted partial network coding (WPNC), which is a generalized coding schema of PNC. WPNC inherits all merits of PNC and part of NC. With WPNC, both decoding delay and receiving fluctuation will be reduced as observed in PNC. Also, WPNC is quite suitable for those applications that require weight assignment to original packets. After providing the whole framework of WPNC and thorough theoretical analysis to its performance, we have demonstrated how WPNC can be integrated with quality of service control and multipath routing supported media streaming in wireless mesh networks. Performance of WPNC is inter-validated by both theoretical analysis and numeric evaluations.