Trade-off between cost and goodput in wireless: Replacing transmitters with coding

Abstract: We study the cost of improving the goodput, or the useful data rate, to user in a wireless network. We measure the cost in terms of number of base stations, which is highly correlated to the energy cost as well as capital and operational costs of a network provider.We show that increasing the available bandwidth, or throughput, may not necessarily lead to increase in goodput, particularly in lossy wireless networks in which TCP does not perform well. As a result, much of the resources dedicated to the user may not translate to high goodput, resulting in an inefficient use of the network resources. We show that using protocols such as TCP/NC, which are more resilient to erasures and failures in the network, may lead to a goodput commensurate the throughput dedicated to each user. By increasing goodput, users' transactions are completed faster; thus, the resources dedicated to these users can be released to serve other requests or transactions. Consequently, we show that translating efficiently throughput to goodput may bring forth better connection to users while reducing the cost for the network providers.