Challenges and new approaches for efficient data gathering and dissemination in pervasive wireless networks

Motivated by the current trends in wireless technologies, we present challenging scenarios consisting of moving and uncoordinated wireless objects as well as algorithms that are likely to perform well in such environments. Our primary interest is to design network protocols to efficiently build and maintain distributed communication systems based on opportunistic design principles. Such systems should continue to operate well even if communication is sporadic, no end-to-end routes are available, and sources and consumers of information are not known in advance. Also the environment poses many challenges, that are typical for wireless mobile devices, such as wireless channel impairments, the impossibility of having up-to-date and accurate views of the network topology at every device, and limited energy resources. In the second part of the paper, we discuss and propose solutions for data dissemination in such an environment by exploiting network coding techniques. Furthermore, we report first results which reveal that network coding largely outperforms standard solutions which are based on the classical store and forward paradigm.