A Network Coding-Based Reliable Multicast Routing Protocol for Efficient Data Delivery in Mobile Ad-hoc Wireless Networks

Abstract

Network coding is an emerging approach which is currently applied to wireless networks to improve network throughput and other performance. However, in mobile ad-hoc wireless networks, because of dynamic network topology, network coding may not improve network throughput if destination nodes fail to retrieve original packets due to lack of necessary information to decode coded packets. In this paper, we propose a Network Coding based Reliable Multicast Routing Protocol, called CRMP, in mobile ad-hoc wireless networks. Our proposed CRMP has the following novel features: i) it builds a stable mesh structure to improve coding and decoding opportunities, ii) it uses random linear network coding to simplify coding algorithm, iii) it has a local route repairing mechanism to prevent decoding failures caused by local route breaks. CRMP is especially well-suited for reliable, high speed multimedia applications. The performance of our proposed CRMP is evaluated via different scenarios. The results show that CRMP outperforms previously proposed multicast routing.