Mobile AD HOC Network and Coding Aware Routing Protocol

Abstract

Wireless ad hoc networks provide the ease of set up with a very low initial cost. To add further ease and facilitate users, wireless nodes can be mobile as well, which makes it a MANET (Mobile ad hoc Network). MANET facilitates the nodes to move in any direction at any given time. MANETs do not require any pre-existing infrastructure to become operational. Hence they can be setup very easily and rapidly in critical areas like rescue zones, disaster recovery sites, military and tactical networks etc. MANET adds the mobility feature to the nodes but all the good things come at some price. MANET faces some challenges in its operation. Nodes keep on changing their geographical location due to which network topology changes frequently. Therefore, the nodes have to keep themselves updated with other nodes and links information (which is a time and resource consuming process), to make better and swift routing decision. In case a node leaves the network or adds in it, an update will be sent to all the other nodes and routes towards the destinations will be recalculated. Also packet loss in data transfer will be faced if a node goes beyond the transmission range of the transmitting one. In such cases, data packets will have to be retransmitted. Retransmitting data packet causes energy efficiency related problems. To overcome all the above mentioned challenges, in our study, we have used opportunistic routing along with network coding aware routing protocol. Opportunistic routing allows us to reach destinations that are not our one hop neighbors. The intermediate nodes help to deliver the data chunks to destination nodes by relaying the data packets through the wireless network. In this process, rather than forwarding the data to a single node, it is forwarded to set of (forwarding) nodes make sure that at least one of the nodes receives the data packet successfully in a single attempt. Also to lessen the total transmissions required for a complete data transfer from source to destination, data packets from different segments are encoded together by intermediate nodes and are then broadcast in a single go instead of transmitting them one by one. Decoding is performed at destination nodes to get the desired data packets.