Network Coding-Aware Routing Protocol in Wireless Mesh Networks

Network coding mechanisms, such as COPE, can improve network throughput effectively in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN). While the Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP) is suitable for WMN, its extension with COPE does not provide any added benefits; specifically, HWMP cannot establish paths with more coding opportunities. As a result, the advantages of network coding cannot be exploited sufficiently. This paper proposes improvements upon HWMP with a new, network Coding-Aware routing protocol (CAHWMP) for WMN. In the CAHWMP protocol, we propose a coding criterion based on data streams to devise an algorithm for actively detecting coding opportunities during path discovery. CAHWMP subsequently establishes paths using the coding-aware routing metric, which can balance channel resource consumption and the gain due to sharing resources introduced by network coding. Simulation results show that CAHWMP can establish paths with more coding opportunities; as a result, it improves network performance such as network throughput.