Linear Packet Network Coding to Enhance Reliability and Resiliency of Next Generation Wireless Networks with Topological Redundancies

The article discusses the use of linear packet network coding (LPNC) to improve reliability and latency in next generation wireless communication networks, particularly for emerging mission critical internet of things (IoT) applications and services. LPNC is a technique for adding redundancy to packets at the upper layers of the radio access network (RAN) protocol stack by partitioning each data packet into equal-sized segments and applying packet-level linear coding, which produces linear combinations of the segments as the output packets of the LPNC layer. It leverages the topological redundancy to send coded segments via multiple diverse routes to a given destination, effectively treating multiple routes as a single data pipe. The receiver can recover the original upper-layer packet if it receives a sufficient number of encoded lower-layer packets. The computation complexity of both encoding and decoding mainly consists of forming the linear combinations of packets which is linear in the packet size. It is shown that with efficient design the contribution of the encoding and decoding process of LPNC to the RAN transmission delay is in microsecond level. The article explores the challenges of implementing LPNC in various wireless network scenarios, such as multi-path and multi-hop integrated access and backhaul (IAB) networks. The proposed solutions include optimizing packet allocation over multiple paths and using adaptive coded-forwarding schemes over multiple hops. The resiliency of LPNC against link blockage in high frequency bands is also evaluated. The article also discusses LPNC for Wi-Fi networks and its benefits in terms of low latency and high reliability in aggregated medium access control protocol data unit (A-MPDU) scenario.