Design and experiment of testbed using network coding for power management

Energy optimization is an important problem in modern wireless embedded systems. In recent years, several techniques have been proposed to optimize power consumption at the computing and communication layers of these systems. Network coding is one of the promising techniques at the communication layer in which multiple messages are opportunistically encoded into a single message to reduce the number of transmissions. While network coding is a theoretically promising technique, its benefit in energy efficiency depends on the practical overheads associated with various computations such as encoding, decoding, and the coding opportunity algorithm itself. Analytical and simulation-based studies are often inadequate to sufficiently evaluate the effectiveness of network coding. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a wireless testbed for the purpose of energy-aware resource management in networked embedded systems. We also evaluate the energy performance of network coding technique under a wide range of channel and traffic conditions. Our results show that the network coding is indeed beneficial under poor channel and heavy network traffic conditions even when all the encoding and decoding overheads are accounted.