Reliable layered multi-cast with source diversity and inter-source network decoding in wireless mesh networks

This paper presents a reliable layered multi-cast with source diversity and inter-source network decoding in wireless mesh networks. The source diversity technique gives path diversity providing a better throughput for layered transmission under hostile environment. For each source, an optimization formulation is set up to find the best transmission route of each transmitting layer. The objectives of the formulation are to maximize a number of transmitting layers and transmission reliability. The source providing the best overall throughput is selected to be the primary source, while the rest will be secondary sources. When the Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantee of some transmitting layers cannot be fulfilled by the primary source, the secondary source with the best QoS parameters is selected to transmit the layer to destinations. The number of secondary sources used for transmissions is increased until the QoS guarantees of all transmitting layers are satisfied or all network resources are utilized. Network coding is deployed to multi-cast layers from the same source for efficient resource usage. Network coding data from different sources can be used together to decode the transmitting data. In other words, at each destination, it needs only a sufficient number of packets from different sources to recover all transmitting data. Simulations with different network topologies show the improvement in throughput and QoS guarantees of layered multi-cast under wireless lossy environment.