Adaptive Forwarding Control using Network Coding for Efficient Multicasting in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

In mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) composed of mobile devices, network resources such as battery capacity and bandwidth are limited. Therefore, in such networks, it is particularly important to reduce unnecessary packet transfers and the use of network resources and power to ensure efficient multicast communications. In this study, we apply network coding to conventional flooding in order to achieve efficient and reliable multicasting in MANETs. Network coding makes it possible to reduce the number of packets transmitted over the network and to use devices and network resources effectively. The packet-reduction benefits obtained using network coding depend greatly on the network topology. Therefore, we propose a novel method called adaptive forwarding control, which uses network coding and flooding for efficient multicasting. Our proposed scheme switches between conventional flooding and network coding, depending on the topology, to derive the benefits from both flooding and network coding.