A network coding-aware routing protocol in wireless Mesh network

Due to the effect of routing strategy and wireless interference on the throughput of wireless Mesh network, traditional routing protocol based on the shortest path can not achieve good performance. Thus, a routing protocol of wireless Mesh network based on network coding in unicast communications is presented. By introducing a conditional link cost, the Markovian model is adopted to design the routing metric which models the cost of a path as the cost of the first hop plus the cost of the second hop conditioned on the first hop, and so on. A path with the lowest conditional cost is chosen to transmit the network-coded packets. The simulation results show that the optimized routing metric can take better advantage of network coding while saving the network resource, as well as that the actual network throughput can be increased by about 20%.