Sliding Window RLNC on Multi-Hop Communication for Low Latency

Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) has been proven to improve the performances of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as throughput and resilience. However, for latency-sensitive applications, sliding window RLNC (SWNC) outperforms the block-based RLNC because it allows instantaneous packet decodeability and reduces the in-order delay. However, most conventional SWNC approaches have been applied to single-hop communication networks since recoding at intermediate nodes destroy the properties of the coding windows. In this work, we consider multi-hop communication networks and propose SWNC-based recoding algorithms that can be applied at inter-mediate nodes. The simulation results show that the proposed recoding algorithms outperform block-based RLNC by 53% in terms of the per-packet delay performance.