Heuristic-based Multicasting Utilizing Network Coding over a Multi-Hop Wireless Mesh Network

Multicasting over a multi-hop wireless mesh network is a challenging issue that recently received less attention. Various applications, such as distance learning, telemedicine, web radio, and online conferencing, require the same information to be sent to multiple recipients. In these applications, the destination nodes are often far from the source, necessitating the design of a multi-hop multicasting protocol. This paper proposes an efficient multi-hop multicasting approach for transmitting packets from the source to all intended destinations. By combining network coding with opportunistic routing, the proposed method significantly reduces the expected number of transmissions a packet must undergo in a lossy wireless network. Specifically, this work introduces a Heuristic-Based Multicasting (HBM) scheme that integrates network coding with opportunistic routing. First, it calculates the minimum route cost from the source node to all the destinations. Then, a novel packet transmission strategy is employed, where packets are combined using network coding and transmitted via a path derived from the Network Coding Assisted Multicasting (NCAM) route cost calculation. Extensive simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the NCAM route cost calculation and the corresponding packet transmission strategy. The results show that the proposed HBM scheme significantly reduces the expected number of packet transmissions in the network, thereby increasing throughput compared to existing multicasting schemes such as MORE, Pacifier, and MLCAR.