D2D Meets Cellular Using Network Coding

Device-to-device (D2D) connections among mobile devices is promising to meet the increasing throughput demand over cellular links. In particular, when mobile devices are in close proximity of each other and are interested in the same content, D2D connections such as Wi-Fi Direct can be opportunistically used to construct a cooperative networking system. In this setup, it is crucial to understand, quantify, and exploit the potential of cooperative mobile devices when D2D connections are used in conjunction with cellular. This paper presents our work on effectively utilizing network coding for cooperative mobile devices that have D2D and cellular connections. In particular, we first develop “Content -Aware Network Coding” algorithm for cooperative mobile devices utilizing cellular and D2D connections. The core idea behind content-aware network coding is to deliver high quality multimedia content to mobile devices by taking into account the importance of each packet. Then, we develop Network Coding with Multiple Interfaces (NCMI) framework, which jointly uses cellular and D2D links to deliver content. NCMI minimizes the amount of time to deliver data to all mobile devices by making a decision on which network coded packets should be transmitted over cellular and D2D connections. We demonstrate the benefits of our algorithms through simulations.