Multicast lifetime maximization using network coding in lossy wireless ad-hoc networks

In traditional stop-and-wait strategy for reliable communications, such as ARQ, retransmission for the packet loss problem would incur a great number of packet transmissions in lossy wireless ad-hoc networks. We study the reliable multicast lifetime maximization problem by alternatively exploring the random linear network coding in this paper. We formulate such problem as a min-max problem and propose a heuristic algorithm, called maximum lifetime tree (MLT), to build a multicast tree that maximizes the network lifetime. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms can significantly increase the network lifetime when compared with the traditional algorithms under various distributions of error probability on lossy wireless links.