Modeling a Novel Network Coding Aware Routing Protocol for Enhancement of Network Performance in Wireless Mesh Network

A Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is a multi-hop network that gains the benefits of low deployment cost, fast access speed, expanded service coverage and large network capacity. However, the multi-hop communication in WMNs limits the throughput capacity due to increased number of packet transmissions. As a result, network coding is a recently emerged paradigm that can enhance the throughput capacity (i.e. network throughput) by minimizing the quantity of network workload and at the same time it ensures the data transfer among all the users. Further, with network coding the transmission effectiveness of a node can be improved by encoding (combining) several packets collectively and verifies whether the coding strategies is satisfied or not. Subsequently, if the coding strategies are satisfied then it transmits only the resultant encoded packet to the desired destination. In other words, network coding can improve the network throughput in WMNs by minimizing the transmission counts needed to transfer several packets to the destination. It should be noted that, while employing network coding in WMNs there are several challenges that should be compensated such as (i) identifying packets that can be combined (encoded) collectively and (ii) integrating the coding strategies in routing protocols. In this paper, we proposed a new mesh routing protocol that integrates network-coding called as Network Coding Aware Routing (Net-CART) protocol. Therefore, to enjoy the whole benefit of network coding a Net-CART protocol uses the innovative routing metric called Code-Aware and Load-Aware Routing Metric. Additionally, to identify numerous coding structures' and to support number of packet encodings' an improved set of coding strategies known as Enhanced Universal Coding Strategies is also proposed. The proposed Net-CART protocol comprising an improved set of coding strategies and a new routing-metric considers both the coding-opportunities and network workload. The simulation study carried out in wide forms of network configurations showed that Net-CART gives more fairness performances than other protocols.