Discovering Messengers with Erasure Coding for Communication in Wireless Ad hoc Networks

Information exchange between distant nodes is the basis for all functionalities of a wireless ad hoc network. To effectively transmit a packet from one node to other distant nodes, the key is messenger discovery. It is important for a sender to find sufficient but not excessive direct neighboring nodes as messengers. On one hand, the messengers should be distant from the sender but not too far away. On the other hand, the messengers should be far from each other. However, the nature of the wireless ad hoc networks makes this mission a great challenge. In this paper, considering limited energy resource and the nature of ad hoc networks, we review the previous protocols and propose a new protocol, exploiting Erasure Coding for messenger discovery. Our proposed protocol is stateless and works in a distributed manner. In each messenger discovery process, the sender encodes a message into multiple packets with erasure coding and broadcasts the packets until it finds enough messengers activated. The receivers decide whether they should act as messengers or not, based on the percentage of received packets and the number of activated messengers. Mathematical analysis and simulations verifies the viability of our protocol, and shows the superiorities of our protocol.