Network Coding Based Reliable Broadcasting in Wireless Ad-hoc Networks

Some applications need to propagate important and critical data to all nodes in a wireless ad-hoc network. Flooding and its variants are good and simple protocols to achieve this target, but they are not efficient. Network coding can improve the performance of these algorithms. In designing such algorithms there are some important parameters which should be taken into account. Energy consumption, coverage and total delay are the most important parameters in a wireless ad-hoc network. Also in the network coding based algorithms, complexity of coding and packet overhead that network coding inserts to the system are important design parameters. In this article, XRBCast, a reliable and energy efficient single source broadcasting algorithm is proposed which uses network coding to achieve better performance. XRBCast guarantees the delivery of desired messages to all nodes. Other advantages of the proposed algorithm are reduced energy consumption and total delay. All coding operations have been done on a unit size finite field which reduces the overhead size and complexity of operations. Reliability is achieved through a simple acknowledge mechanism which is taken from the inherent properties of network coding. Simulations are performed to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed algorithm.