Adaptive Random Linear Network Coding with Controlled Forwarding for wireless broadcast

Multicasting and Broadcasting are important communication techniques in wireless adhoc networks to disseminate control messages and other important information during emergencies, battlefield operations, disaster relief efforts, etc. In this paper we propose an adaptive multi-source broadcasting protocol using Random Linear Network Coding. One key feature of this protocol is its multi-source operation, coding packets from different sources in the same generation. The protocol also efficiently controls the number of re-transmissions based on neighborhood information, limits the size of generations by introducing the concept of Generation Distance (GD) for multi-source operation, supports early decoding, and adaptively calculates the time-out for generations based on the generation size and transmission rate (packets/sec). Simulation results show that inter-mixing of packets from different sources results in improved Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) as well as lower latency, compared to the already proposed single-source schemes. We also investigated its adaptive performance compared to a baseline flooding protocol and show that our protocol delivers consistently high PDR and low latency in both single-source and multi-source scenarios for a range of network densities and traffic rates.