Multicast is a central challenge for emerging multi-hop wireless
architectures such as wireless mesh networks, because of its substantial cost
in terms of bandwidth. In this report, we study one specific case of multicast:
broadcasting, sending data from one source to all nodes, in a multi-hop
wireless network. The broadcast we focus on is based on network coding, a
promising avenue for reducing cost; previous work of ours showed that the
performance of network coding with simple heuristics is asymptotically optimal:
each transmission is beneficial to nearly every receiver. This is for
homogenous and large networks of the plan. But for small, sparse or for
inhomogeneous networks, some additional heuristics are required. This report
proposes such additional new heuristics (for selecting rates) for broadcasting
with network coding. Our heuristics are intended to use only simple local
topology information. We detail the logic of the heuristics, and with
experimental results, we illustrate the behavior of the heuristics, and
demonstrate their excellent performance