Dice: a Game Theoretic Framework for Wireless Multipath Network Coding

Network coding has emerged as a promising approach that enables reliable and efficient end-to-end transmissions in lossy wireless mesh networks. Existing protocols have demonstrated its resilience to packet losses, as well as the ability to integrate naturally with multipath opportunistic routing. However, these heuristics do not take into account the inherent resource competition in wireless networks, thereby compromising the coding advantages. In this paper, we take a game-theoretic perspective towards optimized resource allocation for network coding based unicast protocols. We design decentralized mechanisms that achieve better efficiency-fairness tradeoff, for both cooperative and selfish users. Our framework features a modularized optimization of two sub-problems: the multipath routing of coded information flows for each player, and the broadcast and coding rate allocation among competing players. We have implemented the framework on a wireless emulation testbed and demonstrated its high performance in terms of throughput and fairness.