Today, wireless communications have been widely used in many fields. Wireless communication devices have become an important part of everyday life for the people. However, there are technical problems such as the power consumption, the network traffic optimization, and the reliable data transmission in designing the wireless network efficiently. One of the possible solutions is a packet-level coding in the wireless network. Therefore, this dissertation presents the performance enhancement schemes with packet-level coding in various wireless networks to overcome technical challenges.
The first proposed scheme is a power saving mechanism using network coding (NC) and duty cycling in the bottleneck zone of a wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to prolong the lifetime of WSNs. The lifetime of a WSN depends on the power consumption of the nodes in the bottleneck zone near each sink node, where all sensing data is collected via the nodes in the bottleneck. However, these nodes' energy is depleted very quickly because of the heavy traffic imposed on them. Thus, we propose duty cycling, packet forwarding, and role switching schemes for nodes in the bottleneck zone. In our proposed approach, the packet forwarding in the coder nodes employs random linear network coding (RLNC) to enhance energy efficiency and reliability of the packet delivery in the bottleneck zone. We evaluate the performance to show that the proposed protocol outperforms the conventional system in terms of the lifetime of WSNs, without reducing the reliability of packet delivery in the bottleneck zone. In a grid topology network, the lifetime achieved with the proposed protocol is enhanced as compared with the conventional system.
The second proposed scheme is a multi-way relay system with NC in multi-spot beam satellite networks. In particular, we focus on multiparty video conferencing via a satellite. Our proposed protocol uses the multicasting routing information and number of video frame packets to generate coded packets. The proposed protocol ensures the reliable transmission of multicasting data for mobile users using the decoding error rate for the RLNC batch. To minimize the delay in the link layer, we propose a resource allocation scheme for multiparty video conferencing with NC in satellite communications. For the resource allocation, we use application information acquired by a performance enhancing proxy. The simulation results show that the achievable rate can be increased by the proposed protocol. The proposed protocol can also reduce the number of packet transmissions, resulting in the efficient usage of satellite radio resources. Furthermore, it is shown that the proposed protocol ensures the reliable transmission of multicasting data for mobile users by using resources saved by NC. The average peak signal-to-noise of the video streaming for mobile users is better than that of the conventional system. As a result, the visual quality of video streaming services is improved.
The third proposed scheme is a fully reliable file transfer framework with application layer forward error correction (AL-FEC) for satellite communications on the move (SOTM) systems to enhance the network throughput. In particular, we propose an acknowledgement exchange protocol to ensure the reliability of the end-to-end data transfer as well as a transmission control scheme aided by navigation systems to enhance the resource efficiency in the file transfer framework. The proposed file transfer framework can predict channel blockage by utilizing navigation systems. The proposed mechanism then makes it possible to suspend the data transmission for the duration of the channel blockage. We also theoretically derive the file transfer time, the goodput, and the resource efficiency to justify the effectiveness of the proposed file transfer framework. The performance results show that the proposed file transfer framework can significantly enhance the goodput as compared with that of TCP. Furthermore, the resource efficiency is improved with the aid of the navigation systems.