Network Coding in Multicast Routing for Wireless Link Breakage Problem

Link breakage is one of the critical problems that limit the performance of multicast routing in wireless networks. To ease the problem, we apply network coding to the routing operation. In our proposal, data packets are encoded by a random coding scheme. By performing a re-encoding process, the coding scheme is able to keep conveying the data in the network even though link breakage occurs (without the need of waiting for retransmission). To route encoded packets in the network, a disjoint-path tree is used, which is the routing structure constructed by combining a number of multicast trees without the overlapping links among them. Simulation results show that our proposal can effectively ease the impact of link breakage, achieving better packet delivery ratio and higher multicast capacity under different scenarios.