Network coding is a new transmission paradigm that proved its strength in optimizing the usage of network resources. In this work, we evaluate the gain from using network coding for file sharing applications running on top of wireless mesh networks. With extensive simulations carried out on a simulator we developed specifically for this study, we confirm that network coding can improve the performance of the file sharing application, but not as in wired networks. The main reason is that nodes over wireless cannot listen to different neighbors simultaneously. Nevertheless, one can get more from network coding if the information transmission is made more diverse inside the network. We support this argument by varying the loss rate over wireless links and adding more sources.

If you are interested, you can get the full paper (Technical Report inria-00000874, version 1 - 29 November 2005) as well as the simulator.

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