Coding over Multiple Wireless Interfaces

The unique advantages of wireless communications make them an appealing solution to a growing number of applications. Thus, an increased number of devices and new sets of requirements must be satisfied. To support such ubiquitous communications, next generation 5G networks are expected to withstand 1000-times the capacity of current mobile networks and provide much lower end-to-end latencies, among other ambitious requirements. At the same time, the set of coexisting technologies is richer than ever. Our view is that the increased demands for low latency, highly reliable, and high data rate communication requires existing and new systems to explore alternative methods that go beyond a single active wireless communication link to compensate for highly volatile channel conditions. In particular, this work will consider using multiple wireless interfaces simultaneously, possibly with heterogeneous technologies, to boost information transfer. Then, we advocate that packet-level coding, e.g. network coding, is critical to achieve efficient and practical multipath scheduling mechanisms. To assess the validity of our claims, we investigate the delay performance of coded multipath schemes over a single wireless hop, and provide contributions to minimize different kinds of delay. Our first set of contributions concerns block transmission delays. The first contribution is a practical implementation of file transfer using multiple interfaces on mobile devices. The developed application showcases the challenges as well as the benefits of aggregating multiple interfaces, and the benefits of coding against packet losses. The second contribution provides a fundamental understanding of the transmission of a block of packets. In this case, we derive a lower bound for the amount of information that can be sent with a given reliability over asymmetric and time-constrained interfaces. Leveraging these results, we devise optimal and heuristic policies for a couple of coded schemes, whose evaluation shows that coding and splitting packets across multiple interfaces is at the heart of minimizing the transmission time. Our second set of contributions deals with stream transmissions and looks at packet level delays. Our first take on this subject considers stream transmission between two nodes over time-varying links and addresses the fundamental trade-off between queuing delay and energy consumption. The proposed solution merges online network coding and opportunistic scheduling under a decision theoretic framework. A key observation is that channel diversity plays a very important role on the individual packet service delay. Finally, we analyze the in-order delivery delay of packets to an application, proposing coded schemes that aim to minimize the worst-case delay in limited feedback conditions. Based on our observations, we conclude that communicating over multiple interfaces in simultaneous offers clear benefits that stem not only from (i) increased bandwidth but also (ii) diversity. Also, coding techniques are fundamental in seizing such benefits by (i) ensuring that bandwidth is efficiently utilized in limited feedback conditions, and (ii) greatly simplifying the design of scheduling mechanisms in the presence of asymmetric channel characteristics.

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