On Goodput and Energy Measurements of Network Coding Schemes in the Raspberry Pi

Given that next generation networks are expected to be populated by a large number of devices, there is a need for quick deployment and evaluation of alternative mechanisms to cope with the possible generated traffic in large-scale distributed data networks. In this sense, the Raspberry Pi has been a popular network node choice due to its reduced size, processing capabilities, low cost and its support by widely-used operating systems. For information transport, network coding is a new paradigm for fast and reliable data processing in networking and storage systems, which overcomes various limitations of state-of-the-art routing techniques. Therefore, in this work, we provide an in-depth performance evaluation of Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC)-based schemes for the Raspberry Pi Models 1 and 2, by showing the processing speed of the encoding and decoding operations and the corresponding energy consumption. Our results show that, in several scenarios, processing speeds of more than 80 Mbps in the Raspberry Pi Model 1 and 800 Mbps in the Raspberry Pi Model 2 are attainable. Moreover, we show that the processing energy per bit for network coding is below 1 nJ or even an order of magnitude less in these scenarios.