GRAPEVINE: hybrid cooperative opportunistic routing for challenged wireless networks using fountain coding

Abstract

This paper present Grapevine, a wireless networking protocol designed to be used in challenged environments such an emergency response network. These environments typically experience a lot of noise, interference, disconnections and high mobility resulting in high packet loss rates. As often critical data needs to be disseminated to other nodes it is important to have a protocol that efficiently delivers data under these conditions, but which is also efficient under good conditions. Grapevine uses to fountain coding to opportunistically and cooperatively to efficiently delivers data in high throughput wireless multi hop networks, as well as lossy and delay tolerant networks. Results show that our flooding based protocol is more efficient than traditional protocols in lossy networks both in terms of lower delay and lower overhead.