Chapter 7
Integration of Opportunistic Routing and Network Coding
All the coordination schemes or protocols discussed in the previous chapter need to modify the MAC layer or depend on physical layer information, which may not be an easy task. In order to use off-the-shelf IEEE standard compatible hardware devices, it is desirable to make minimum (or zero) modifications to the lower layers and focus on the routing layer and above.
To this end, this chapter takes a different approach to the above issue by integrating network coding into opportunistic routing. In particular, it presents how network coding can help ease the coordination in opportunistic routing. A classical work integrating opportunistic routing and network coding, MORE, will be introduced. Then, a broadcast scheme integrating symbol level network coding with opportunistic listening will be described, with applications to mobile content distribution (MCD) in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs).
The rest of this chapter is organized as follows. Section 7.1 gives a brief introduction to MORE, a state-of-the-art MAC-independent opportunistic routing protocol. Section 7.2 introduces the problem of mobile content distribution in VANETs. We survey the related works on mobile content distribution in VANETs in Section 7.3. Then, Section 7.4 reviews symbol level network coding (SLNC) and its major advantages compared with PLNC are shown through both theoretical analysis and simulation. After that, for two example mobile content ...
