Delay tolerant podcasting with network coding

We present a new protocol for information dissemination in intermittently connected networks. The objective of the protocol is to disseminate a piece of information, a podcast episode in our scenario, to a subset of nodes of the network by exploiting the random opportunistic contacts occurring among them. To allow for minimum coordination among nodes we leverage a network coding technique. Our protocol is particularly suitable for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) where the duration of a contact among two nodes is likely to be short. We present theoretical analysis of the protocol backed up by a comparison against the previously proposed E-NCP protocol using simulations. © 2010 IEEE.