FUN Coding: Design and Analysis.

Joint FoUntain coding and Network coding FUN is proposed to boost information spreading over multi-hop lossy networks. The novelty of our FUN approach lies in combining the best features of fountain coding, intra-session network coding, and cross-next-hop network coding. This paper provides an in-depth study of FUN codes. First, we theoretically analyze the throughput of FUN codes. Second, we identify several practical issues that may undermine the actual performance, such as buffer overflow, and quantify the resulting throughput degradation. Finally, we propose a systematic design to overcome these issues. Simulation results in TDMA multi-hop networks show that our methods yield near-optimal throughput and are significantly better than fountain codes and existing network coding schemes.