Multipath Communication with Finite Sliding Window Network Coding for Ultra-Reliability and Low Latency

Abstract: We use random linear network coding (RLNC) based scheme for multipath communication in the presence of lossy links with different delay characteristics to obtain ultra-reliability and low latency. A sliding window version of RLNC is proposed where the coded packets are generated using packets in a window size and are inserted among systematic packets in different paths. The packets are scheduled in the paths in a round robin fashion proportional to the data rates. We use finite encoding and decoding window size and do not rely on feedback for closing the sliding window, unlike the previous work. Our implementation of two paths with LTE and WiFi characteristics shows that the proposed sliding window scheme achieves better latency compared to the block RLNC code. It is also shown that the proposed scheme achieves low latency communication through multiple paths compared to the individual paths for bursty traffic by translating the throughput on both the paths into latency gain.