Error recovery based on FEC in network-layer for Intermittently Connected Mobile Networks

Reliable transmission in Intermittently Connected Mobile Networks (ICMNs) is a challenging work because the effective and reliable connection between the source and destination can not be sustained in ICMNs. To reliably hand over data to the destination, many dissemination-based routing protocols are proposed. Dissemination-based routing protocols assure nodes including intermediate nodes and destinations have more chances to receive packets, which will increase the probability that the packets can be correctly received by the destination. However, the existing error recovery mechanisms in network layer use the simple CRC to check the data packets independently, and discard the error packets even if one correct packet can be obtained from more than one partly error packet. In this paper, we propose a novel Network layer Error Recovery method based on FEC, named NER. NER divides a data packet into RS blocks and insert redundancy to each block. So the intermediate nodes and destinations can recover a correct data packet from multiple partially error copies of the same packet. The simulation results show that NER can obviously increase the delivery-ratio in ICMNs.