A reliable multicast for MANETs based on opportunistic routing and network coding

Wenzhong Yang, Chuanhe Huang, Bo Wang, Zhenyu Zhang, Tong Wang

Abstract: Opportunistic routing is a recent routing paradigm that achieves high throughput in the face of universally lossy wireless links in mobile ad hoc networks, likewise, network coding popularly investigated by many institutes is another approach of improving the throughput in wireless networks. How to combine the both techniques is an interesting research. To our knowledge, this is still an open issue to implement the multicast routing in mobile ad hoc networks simultaneously employing the both mechanisms. Due to feedback explosion, most existing wireless network multicast protocols don't guarantee the reliable delivery. In this paper, we propose a novel reliable multicast protocol based on the opportunistic routing and network coding. Additionally, we also provide an ETX (expected number of transmissions) based cost metric formula of the multicast subgroup. Extensive simulation reveals that the performance of the novel presented multicast routing protocol outperforms the conventional multicast routing protocol in ad hoc wireless networks.