Network-coded broadcast incremental power algorithm for energy-efficient broadcasting in wireless ad-hoc network

An important operation in multi-hop wireless ad-hoc networks is broadcasting, which propagates information throughout the network. We are interested to explore the issue of broadcasting, where all nodes of the network are sources that want to transmit information to all other nodes, in an ad-hoc wireless network. Our performance metric is energy efficiency, a vital defining factor for wireless networks as it directly concerns the battery life and thus network longevity. We show the benefits network coding has to offer in a wireless ad-hoc network as far as energy-savings is concerned, compared to the store-and-forward strategy. Network coded broadcasting concentrates on reducing the number of transmissions performed by each forwarding node in the all-to-all broadcast application, where each forwarding node combines the incoming messages for transmission. The total number of transmissions can be reduced using network coding, compared to broadcasting using the same forwarding nodes without coding. In this paper, we present the performance of a network coding-based Broadcast Incremental Power (BIP) algorithm for all-to-all broadcast. Simulation results show that optimisation using network coding method lead to substantial improvement in the cost associated with BIP.