Progressive Network Coding for Message-Forwarding in Ad-Hoc Wireless Networks

We consider multi-hop transmission from the source to the destination in ad-hoc wireless networks. Cooperative forwarding approaches in the framework of progressive network coding are proposed which generalize coded cooperation in a multi-hop context. In this framework, the source node and each succeeding relay node progressively decode what they receive from the previous stages and re-encode the messages to different parts of the parity bits from a single (network) codeword hop by hop. The maximal achievable rates for the multi-hop wireless networks using traditional repetition-forward and progressive network coding are analyzed with respect to different transmit power constraint and packet length allocation. The optimal number of relays are derived in each scheme. It is found that progressive network coding with adaptive packet length significantly increases the system throughput and improves the energy efficiency