Network coding based reliable broadcast protocol in Multi-Channel Multi-Radio Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Multi-Channel Multi-Radio (MCMR) Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have emerged as a new paradigm in multi-hop wireless networks. In a typical MCMR WMNs, each node has multiple radios with multiple available channels on each radio, which allows nodes to have simultaneous transmissions and receptions. Therefore, network performance is improved. As a key technology in WMNs, reliable broadcast can provide efficient data transmission. GreedyCode is a network coding based reliable broadcast protocol proposed by our group earlier, whose basic idea is to opportunistically select the forwarders with the highest transmission efficiency to transmit the encoded packets while the neighbors just listen. In this paper, we consider one-to-all broadcast scenarios and propose a novel GreedyCode based reliable broadcast protocol MCMR-GreedyCode, which is two-fold: channel assignment and link scheduling. Specially, we propose the Level Channel Assignment Strategy (LCAS) algorithm and determine the number of data packets to be sent each time according to the feedback information from one-hop neighbor nodes. In addition, any intermediate node that receives complete data can forward data to those nodes that don't. The process repeats until all destination nodes receive complete data. Simulation results show that MCMR-GreedyCode has lower network latency and greater throughput than some existing network protocols, such as GreedyCode, MCM, MLRM, etc.