Data Dissemination consists on spreading a large amount of information to all nodes belonging to a network. Thus it can be applied for different purposes in a lot of practical scenarios. The peculiar characteristics of the system in use make the definition of efficient data dissemination schemes an interesting and challenging goal. In particular, developing efficient algorithms for wireless ad hoc networks is still an open issues due to the broadcast nature of the channel and to the need of managing all data transmissions in a distributed way. The former leads to a lot of problems related to the channel contention, collisions and interference. The latter requires to define algorithms which exploit only local information of the network and which are scalable and robust to the node mobility.
In this presentation we investigate how data dissemination schemes can be enhanced by the use of network coding. Network coding is a recent paradigm applied at network layer to increase the throughput. A lot of studies showed its effectiveness form a theoretical point of view. We, instead, investigate practical aspects related to the implementation of data dissemination schemes based on network coding in realistic environments affected by interference, collisions, fading and so on.