BCNC: A Reliable Transmission Mechanism for FANET Based on Network Coding

Communication links in flying ad-hoc networks (FANETs) often experience interruptions or intermittent interruptions. The interruption of links directly affects the reliability of data transmission between different nodes, and also increases the resource overhead and transmission delay of the network. Random linear network coding (RLNC) can adapt well to changes in network topology and has greater robustness to link quality. But its decoding success probability will significantly decrease with the increase of link hops. In this paper, we propose a reliable transmission mechanism of broadcasting collaborating with network coding based on RLNC. Through the coding gain of network coding and the gain of the designed broadcasting mechanism, it can effectively improve the packet transmission reliability of FANET nodes in the scenario with link interruption. The simulation results show that the proposed mechanism has higher data transmission reliability and less overhead ratio compared to the typical RLNC mechanism. Moreover, under the same overhead ratio, the data transmission reliability of the proposed mechanism is mostly superior to the retransmission redundancy mechanism Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (HARQ).