Dynamic Load Allocation for Multi-Homing via Coded Packets

This paper seeks to understand and characterize policies that exploit multiple available technologies and/or het- erogeneous communication routes simultaneously with the goal of improving throughput and energy performance or economi- cal costs. Such policies may be instrumental towards allowing improved services to mobile devices in converged networks. We present an optimization framework and a set of allocation policies to provide efficient, channel-aware load allocation for multi- homed devices under different cost criteria. Network coding is used as a key enabler of these techniques as coding across packets requires less coordination, simpler and less frequent feedback mechanisms, and higher resiliency to changes in the transmission channel. Our formulation incorporates bursty erasure channels, multiple simultaneous communication routes, and different chan- nel coding and modulations available to each technology as part of the resource allocation optimization. Numerical results are pro- vided showing that dynamic allocation policies are instrumental to improving resource efficiency by reducing energy consumption and/or channel utilization. The energy gains of our proposed policies outperform the best fixed network coding multi-homing policies by a factor of 2 in some scenarios.