Network Coded Wireless Cooperative Multicast with Minimum Transmission Cost

We study multicasting over wireless lossy links. Instead of downloading all the data from the source node, we allow the destination nodes themselves to locally exchange the packets, as local communication within a cluster achieves higher packet reception probability with less transmission cost. However, when shall we stop the transmission from the source node? If the source stops too early, the destination nodes locally cannot reconstruct all the original packets, while if the source stops too late, the benefit of cooperative data exchange cannot be fully exploited. In this paper, we propose a network coded hybrid source and cooperative exchange scheme to determine when to stop the source sending and start the exchange process, so as to minimize the total transmission cost. For the case when the clusters are predefined, we derive the expected total transmission cost with our hybrid scheme. Our theoretical results show that under a special condition, the source node should keep sending the packets until all the destinations get the complete information. For the case when the clusters are not predefined, we propose a cluster division algorithm such that the destination nodes within each cluster can conduct data exchange locally with energy efficiency. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.