Network-coding based event diffusion for wireless networks using semi-broadcasting

Publish/subscribe is a well known and powerful distributed programming paradigm with many potential applications. Publish/subscribe content dissemination techniques based on opportunistic networking and network coding-based epidemic routing are key techniques for optimizing network resources, simplifying network architecture, and providing a platform for realizing innovative networking applications and service. In this paper we consider the central problem of any pub/sub implementation, namely the problem of event dissemination, in the case of a wireless mesh network. We propose a new dissemination strategy based on the notion of semi-broadcast. In a semi-broadcast based protocol the actual content is disseminated in two phases. In the first phase only a fraction of the content is broadcasted (pushed) over the network and stored inside any node, whereas in the second phase the missed part is retried (pulled) on demand from other nodes. Thanks to network coding the partial content stored in each node at the end of the first phase is a set of random linear combinations over the whole content. This allows a very efficient recovery strategy as the missed part is found in nearby nodes with a high probability.The benefit of this approach is that only the interested subscribers, which can vary in number and position over time, can engage the pulling phase. We propose several protocols based on non-trivial forwarding mechanisms that employ network coding as a central tool for supporting adaptive event dissemination while exploiting the broadcast nature of wireless transmissions and guided to the semi-broadcast principle. We show a considerable enhancement in term of total flooding costs and full decoding rates by a self parameter control deployment during the dissemination procedure. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.