Robust Broadcasting in Tactical Networks Using Network Coding

Broadcasting (communicating information from one to all or many to all nodes in a network) is an important communication primitive in tactical networks. To reduce the spectral cost of broadcast, instead of using simple flooding, many proposed broadcast protocols such as the Simplified Multicast Forwarding (SMF) employ local topology information to decrease the number of packet retransmissions. The performance of such optimizations depends on the accuracy of the topology information. In this work, we propose an alternative approach that is based on network coding. This protocol determines, based on a node´s view of its local topology, how many coded packets each node rebroadcasts. Our results show that network-coding based broadcasting has lower spectral cost and is more robust to partial/inaccurate local topology knowledge than protocols based on SMF.