Performance of network coding for ad hoc networks in realistic simulation scenarios

Network coding has recently emerged as an effective solution for multicast and broadcast communications in ad hoc networks. We focus on broadcast traffic and design a network coding-based scheme that we compare against simpler solutions, by using the network simulator ns-2. Indeed, while often the benefits of network coding have been shown via theoretical analysis or in simplified simulation scenarios, our aim is to assess the performance of network coding in ad hoc networks when a realistic MAC protocol is considered. Our results show that the performance of network coding for traffic broadcasting strongly depends on the network node density and on the generation size. In particular, network coding leads to significant gains in terms of end-to-end packet loss probability and protocol overhead only when the average number of neighbors per node is higher than 12.