Hop-by-hop Content Distribution with Network Coding in Multihop Wireless Networks

The predominant use of today's networks is content access and distribution. Network Coding (NC) is an innovative technique that has potential to improve the efficiency of multicast content distribution over multihop Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) by allowing intermediate Forwarding Nodes (FNs) to encode and then forward data packets. Practical protocols are needed to realize the benefits of the NC technique. However, the existing NC-based multicast protocols cannot accurately determine the minimum number of coded packets that a FN should send in order to ensure successful data delivery to the destinations, so that many redundant packets are injected into the network, leading to performance degradation. In this paper, we propose HopCaster, a novel reliable multicast protocol that incorporates network coding with hop-by-hop transport. HopCaster completely eliminates the need for estimating the number of coded packets to be transmitted by a FN, and avoids redundant packet transmissions. It also effectively addresses the challenges of heterogeneous multicast receivers. Moreover, a cross-layer multicast rate adaptation mechanism is proposed, which enables HopCaster to optimize multicast throughput by dynamically adjusting wireless transmission rate based on the changes in the receiver population and channel conditions during the course of multicasting a coded data chunk. Our evaluations show that HopCaster significantly outperforms the existing NC-based multicast protocols.