Reliable and High QoS Wireless Communications over Harsh Environments

One of the most challenging research fields in which research community has taken a very active role is focused on trying to bring the features of wireless networks into line with the traditional wired solutions. Given the noisy and lossy nature of the wireless medium, it is more difficult to provide a comparable Quality of Service (QoS) and Reliability over wireless networks. This lack of reliability avoids the use of wireless solution in scenarios under harsh environment and mission-critical applications. In this paper we propose an inter-node collaborative schema with the aim of improving the achievable QoS level for multicast streaming, through the use of Network Coding and the algebra it is based on. We also present an implementation of the described algorithm on the OPNET discrete event simulation tool. Experimental results highlighting the performance achieved by the proposed algorithm and its improved efficiency as compared to other solutions are described.