Investigating an Adaptive Network Coding Control Protocol for Multihop-Multipath Networks for Network Reconfigurability

One of the challenges in current designs of wireless networks is that of guaranteeing end to end delivery of high priority data or packets in multi-path multi-hop networks for medical use especially for nodes with mobility. There are various solutions based on traffic engineering which are applied in wired networks to guarantee end to end delivery of packets. With mobile wireless networks, the environment is highly dynamic, therefore with different scenarios having multiple paths or routes in the network, the node has to adapt to the network for dependable delivery of priority packets. In so doing, a level of Qos can at least be guaranteed. This paper reviews some of the techniques to achieve adaptive network coding, and the objective is to implement adaptive network coding in multi-hop, multipath network for high reliability and dependability. As a preliminary study we investigate an Adaptive Network coding scheme in a Binary tree fashion with the root being the convolution coder for its feasibility. The objective is to design a control protocol to be used to adapt to the error changes that occur in the network thereby increasing performance.