Mechanism for Coding-Aware Opportunistic Retransmission in Wireless Networks

Efficient and reliable communications is a critical issue in wireless networks with lossy links. In this paper, we propose a neighbor-assisted coding aware opportunistic retransmission mechanism to increase the network throughput. The key idea behind our design is as follows. If a node fails to receive a packet due to link loss, its neighboring node(s) receiving the packet can assist the retransmission of the packet, possibly encoded with other packet(s) via localized network coding, if such retransmission is expected to be beneficial. This can effectively reduce the total number of packet retransmissions at the MAC layer. Simulation results show that our proposed mechanism can significantly increase the network throughput as compared with existing work.