Network Joint Coding-Aware Routing for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

It is proven that network coding can greatly improve network throughput in wireless networks (e.g. COPE [2]). Recently, there is a growing interest of applying routing protocols to network coding for wireless ad hoc networks aiming at exploiting the throughput and other performance. However, in all the proposed network coding schemes, the decoding procedure should be completed in one-node only, no matter how many hops the XORed packets traversed. Upon that, we introduce a novel network coding-aware routing mechanism called Network Joint Coding-Aware Routing (NJCAR), which aims to overcome this restriction. Our design has capability to explore the entire potential routes between a given source and destination to effectively seeks for the multiple hops decoding opportunities, while present wireless network routing protocols fail to do so. Simulation results in ns-2 show that NJCAR outperforms COPE in some scenarios.