Studies on Bandwidth Auction Mechanisms with Network Coding in Wireless Networks

Piriya Chaikijwatana (0951208)

Recently, it has been proven that network coding has a great potential to improve the throughput in wireless networks by exploiting the broadcast nature of wireless medium. However, network coding may not be effective in multi- rate wireless environment. Because the relay node that performs network coding chooses the minimal rate of outgoing links in broadcast rate selection, the high-rate links cannot be fully utilized. Hence the overall network throughput cannot be improved. In order to enhance the network coding opportunities, cooperative network coding has been proposed.

In this thesis, we propose a generalized VCG auction mechanism for wireless network bandwidth allocation. In our bandwidth auction, we firstly utilize network coding in single-rate wireless networks. In this method, network coding is used to reduce the number of wireless transmissions and social surplus is maximized by deriving the optimization problem so as to efficiently allocate the bandwidth. Moreover, we secondly utilize the cooperative network coding in multi-rate wireless networks. In this method, cooperative network coding is used to enhance the network coding opportunities in multi-rate wireless environment and social surplus is maximized by deriving the optimization problem so as to efficiently allocate the bandwidth. We evaluate the performance of our proposed auctions with simulations. In numerical examples, we show the effectiveness of bandwidth allocation with auction mechanism, effectiveness of network coding for bandwidth auction in single-rate wireless networks, and effectiveness of cooperative network coding for bandwidth auction in multi-rate wireless networks.