Abstract
In order to mitigate the overhead of the routing protocols in any large-scale network, the hierarchical protocol has been proposed in the early 1980's. However, the message relay would entail the huge throughput reduction in such a hierarchical network. Thanks to the recently developed network coding techniques, a high-throughput low-complexity hierarchical protocol can be facilitated due to the multiple-source relay-based data transmissions built on the network coding schemes, especially for the data communications between the adjacent network levels. In this paper, we will apply the random geometry theory to evaluate the network performance of the proposed hierarchical routing method in the statistical average sense. Three essential measures, namely routing complexity, end-to-end throughput and average network throughput, are formulated and derived thereby. The numerical results demonstrate that the significant improvements in terms of these three network performance measures can be achieved by the proposed hierarchical routing protocol using network coding according to our new statistical analysis. ©2010 IEEE.