Performance of network coding in ad hoc networks

Network coding, the notion of performing coding operations on the contents of packets while in transit through the network, was originally developed for wired networks; recently, however, it has been also applied with success also to wireless ad hoc networks. In fact, it has been shown that network coding can yield substantial performance gains, e.g., reduced energy consumption, in ad hoc networks. In this paper, we compare, using linear programming formulations, the maximum throughput that a multicast application can achieve with and without network coding in unreliable ad hoc networks; we show that network coding achieves 65% higher throughput than conventional multicast in a typical ad hoc network scenario. The superiority of network coding, already established by the analytic results, is confirmed by simulation experiments.