Performance enhancement of multimedia traffic over wireless ad hoc networks using network coding

Network coding is a new area of networking, in which data is processed inside the network to increase throughput, to balance traffic load and to save bandwidth of a network. Network Coding performs well in lossy wireless networks in both multicast and broadcast scenarios. Even in wireless networks with low density of nodes network coding performs well using its multi-copy packet transmission scheme. Because of Wireless Ad hoc Network´s ease in configuration and quick deployment, such networks are widely preferred for instant data transmission for many applications including multimedia. But the available bandwidth for Wireless Ad hoc Networks fails to meet the requirements of multimedia video data transmission and results in packets loss, delay as well as decreases the quality of transmitted multimedia data. So, to overcome Wireless Ad hoc Networks limitations for multimedia video (video considered in MPEG 4 format) transmission, a variant of Network Coding that is Random Linear Network Coding with Multi Generation Mixing is employed by network nodes. So, in this work, each sender node encodes packet using RLNC with Multi Generation Mixing (MGM) with the aim to provide more protection to I (Intra frame of MPEG 4 video traffic) frames in order to minimize multiplicative loss by incurring slight delay in transmission. In this work, simulations are carried out by changing protocol parameters and its effects on network parameters and performance parameters are analyzed. Simulation results confirm with intuition that the performance get enhanced using Random Linear Network Coding with MGM.