Reliability of all-to-all broadcast with network coding

Wireless communication is notoriously lossy due to channel fading, interference and multi-path effects. This work investigates the reliability of all-to-all broadcast in lossy wireless networks where the reliability is measured by the probability that every node in the network receives or decodes the native packet of every other node. To improve the reliability, a novel network coding scheme, namely random neighbour network coding (RNNC) scheme is proposed, which is capable of adaptively generating encoding packets according to the packets received from lossy wireless channels. The network reliability is analysed theoretically and the optimal RNNC scheme that maximises the reliability of a given network is obtained. The theoretical analysis is validated using simulations and it is shown that RNNC can improve the network reliability significantly. © 2013 IEEE