Network Coding Based Mesh-Under Routing In 6LoWPAN with High End-to-End Packet Delivery Rate

In 6LoWPAN protocol, in order to deliver an IPv6 packet in the IEEE 802.15.4 based wireless personal area network (WPAN), an IPv6 packet is divided into multiple fragments, with each being incorporated in an IEEE 802.15.4 MAC frame, such that the size of each frame is no more than the Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) of the frame. Usually, retransmission is used to reliably deliver an IPv6 packet to the destination node in the WPAN with lossy links. To improve the end-to-end packet delivery rate (PDR) of the mesh-under routing (MUR) presented in the 6LoWPAN protocol, we present a network coding based mesh-under routing (NC-MUR) scheme. The main idea underlying NC-MUR is that, the source node generates an encoded frame in addition to the M non-coded frames derived from the IPv6 packet, and then the M+1 fragments are delivered to the destination so that the destination can recover the IPv6 packet so long as any M fragments among them are received. Theoretical analyses show that NC-MUR outperforms MUR in terms of PDR and energy consumption in the cases where fragment error rate is moderate or high.