Network Coded TCP Throughput Analysis in Wireless Mesh Networks

Network coding not only improves TCP performance in lossy wireless multi-hop networks, but also changes other features of the TCP protocol such as the evolutionary process of the congestion window, which raises new issues about rate control, fairness etc. This paper analyzes the evolutionary process of network coded TCP against lossy links and error correcting coding. Ignoring the slow start phase, we describe the state transition process of congestion window and available window by a three-dimensional Markov chain model. With maximum window size, end-to-end erasure rate and redundancy factor as input parameters, the numerical analysis model calculates throughput of network coded TCP to carry quantitative analysis of factors that affect the network coded TCP performance. Simulation results on NS2 show that our numerical analysis model achieves fairly high accuracy.