Energy efficient broadcasting using network coding aware protocol in wireless ad hoc network

Energy efficient broadcasting is of paramount importance for many broadcast applications in wireless ad hoc networks. With respects network coding, it has been proved that the energy gain is upper bounded by 3. However, the coding opportunity is often highly dependent on the established routing paths, resulting in that a lot of coding opportunities could be lost in practice. By combining network coding with the Connected Dominating Set (CDS)-based broadcasting, we take full use of network coding. The intuition behind our algorithm is to intersect information flows at nodes in CDS to increase the coding opportunities. We design a scheme, named NCDS, that uses Network Coding over Connected Dominating Set, to reduce energy consumption. Our experimental results show that NCDS provides up to 161% gains compared to blind flooding, and 37% gains compared to CDS-based broadcasting without network coding.