CAPF: Coded anycast packet forwarding for wireless mesh networks

In wireless mesh networks, delay and reliability are two critical issues in the support of delay-sensitive applications. Due to sleep scheduling designed for energy efficiency, a node along an end-to-end path needs to wait for its next hop to wake up before it can transmit, which incurs extra delay. In addition, because of unreliable wireless communications, a node may not successfully receive the packet even when it is in active mode. In this paper, we propose a coded anycast packet forwarding (CAPF) scheme for both unicast and multicast communications such that the delay can be reduced and the reliability can be improved. We theoretically analyze the impact of nodes' awake probability and the link loss probability on the end-to-end delay and the reliability. A tradeoff between the end-to-end delay and the reliability is also investigated. Simulation results demonstrate that CAPF provides a flexible mechanism to make good delay-reliability tradeoff and is effective to reduce the end-to-end delay and enhance the reliability. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.