Network coding in military wireless ad hoc and sensor networks: Experimentation with GardiNet

Network coding is a communication paradigm that allows intermediate nodes to mix packets instead of simply relaying them. Motivated by applications in military tactical networks, this paper explores the use of the network coding. It has been proved that network coding has many benefits in wireless communications such as optimal capacity achievement and packet loss recovery. In this paper, we present a generic architecture for network coding for broadcast in wireless networks called GardiNet. GardiNet is generic; its design is divided into building blocks in order to enable it to adapt to different application scenarios. In this paper, we start by describing GardiNet for wireless ad hoc networks and in particular for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Then, we present experiment results of GardiNet in FIT IoT-LAB, a real testbed of WSNs. Results show that network coding performs well under real wireless conditions. In addition, we highlight the benefit of the Sliding Encoding Window scheme of GardiNet (SEW) to allow sensors to decode packets in real time.