In the scope of European project Haggle we are interested in new paradigms in networking enabling opportunistic communication in wireless networks without any infrastructure and only intermittent connectivity. With such hypothesis classical routing based approach cannot work and new communications schemes should be developped. One solution that is gaining a lot of interests is coming from multi-user information theory and is named "Network Coding". In this approach a node is not simply forwarding received packets following routing paths but will combine received packets from different nodes into a linear combination with random coefficient and broadcast it to its neighboors. At reception a node receives these different linear combination and solve the correponding system of linear equation to figure out the packets that have been mixed. This approach is known to have better resilience to changes due to intermittence and node mobility, and to reach higher throughput than classical approaches.
We are supported by Haggle, a European Union funded project in Situated and Autonomic Communications