Towards efficient and practical network coding in delay tolerant networks

Network coding techniques offer an emerging solution to efficient data transmission in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN). To date, abundant techniques have been developed on exploiting network coding in DTN, however, most of them bring additional overhead due to the extra coded message redundancy. In this paper, we analyze the coded message redundancy issue, and then propose NTC, an efficient network coding scheme for DTN. In NTC, a novel metric named “redundancy ratio” is introduced within the anti-entropy message exchange process. We also discuss the design and implementation of practical NTC in detail. To evaluate the performance of our proposed NTC scheme, we implement NTC in ONE, the current state-of-the-art simulator for DTN. Simulation results show that, comparing with existing schemes, our proposed NTC scheme has significant advantages in enhancing the message delivery ratio and reducing the transmission overhead.