Multi-rate Network Coding for Energy-Efficient Multicast in Heterogeneous Wireless Multi-hop Networks
Lei Wang, Yuwang Yang, Wei Zhao, Lei Xu and Shaohua Lan
This paper proposes a multi-rate network coding scheme to improve the energy efficiency and throughput of multicast transmission in wireless multi-hop networks. In current researches, network coding is often employed to improve the network performance such as throughput and energy efficiency. By employing network coding, the transmission rate of network could achieve the multicast capacity which is equal to the minimal one of the max-flows from the source node to different receivers. However, due to various receiving rates at receivers, the bandwidth usages of users cannot be maximized by applying network coding. In order to improve this problem, we propose a practical heuristic algorithm to implement multi-rate network coding to increase the overall transmission rate. The proposed scheme enables more data to be transmitted avoiding excessive additional transmissions, and therefore, the energy efficiency is significantly improved.We also perform simulations to demonstrate that the network throughput and energy efficiency are both dramatically increased.
Keywords: Multi-rate network coding; energy efficiency; multicast; wireless multi-hop networks