A Proactive Network Coding Strategy for Pervasive Wireless Networking

In recent years, network coding has proved to be an efficient tool to disseminate data through a network. A number of practical schemes have been proposed to implement network coding also in wireless environments. Most of them are based on reactive and probabilistic random network coding and their effectiveness has been investigated under the assumption of idealized network conditions. However, recent work has shown that the benefits of such strategies decrease when applied in realistic network environments. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to efficiently disseminate data through network coding in realistic wireless networks by using a proactive approach, named ProNC. We develop a distributed and self-adaptable protocol which substantially increases the performance of network coding in practical scenarios and achieves full reliability with both low protocol overhead and low delay. We show the effectiveness of ProNC via ns-2 simulations and compare it with previously proposed schemes.