Network Coding for Improving the Fairness of Long-Hop TCP Flows in a Multi-Hop Wireless Network

Long-hop TCP flows undergo throughput degradation when contending with short-hop TCP flows in a multi-hop wireless network due to collision related losses. Long hop flows compared to the short hop flows have to contend for the medium more number of times and hence suffer more number of collisions. In this paper, we propose a network coding scheme based on the timed network coding to improve the fairness of long-hop TCP flows in a multi-hop wireless network. The network coding reduces the number of transmission in wireless which leads in less contension and less collisions. As per our knowledge, this is the first attempt to apply network coding for alleviating TCP unfairness problem. We corroborate our proposed scheme with simulations in NS-2. Simulation results show that the proposed network coding scheme provides improvement in fairness of longhop TCP flows.