Chapter 10 - Network Coding in Disruption Tolerant Networks

Abstract

Disruption Tolerant Network (DTN) scenarios often arise from mobile wireless networks, where due to limited transmission power, fast node mobility, sparse node density, and frequent equipment failures, there is often no contemporaneous path from the source to the destination node(s). It reviews research works that studied the benefits of applying random linear coding (RLC) to DTNs. First, it reviews traditional non-coding routing schemes for broadcast and unicast applications in DTNs, and the basic operations of RLC. After introducing the design space of DTN routing, then focuses on the performance evaluation of RLC based routing schemes for broadcast communication and unicast communication. For both communications, the RLC based schemes improve the trade-off between energy expenditure and delivery performance. In addition, research efforts in the performance modeling of RLC schemes, priority coding protocol, RLC based secure unicast scheme are also discussed. For both communication models, the RLC based scheme provides better trade-off between energy consumption and delivery performance. The performance metrics for evaluating different broadcast routing schemes include: energy efficiency, often measured by the total number of transmissions required to transmit a packet to all receivers; packet delivery ratio, the fraction of packets that are received by all the destinations; and packet delivery delay.