HCOR: a high-throughput coding-aware opportunistic routing for inter-flow network coding in wireless mesh networks

Coding-aware routing is an effective approach to create more coding opportunities in inter-flow network coding. To the best of our knowledge, most of the coding-aware routing schemes focus on maximizing the coding opportunities. However, for opportunistic transmission, the throughput is not always increased with the increase of coding opportunities. In this paper, we explore why this case will happen and how to measure the benefits of network coding in the opportunistic routing. According to the above conclusions, we propose a novel high-throughput coding-aware opportunistic routing (HCOR) to achieve the maximal throughput gain in wireless mesh networks. HCOR is based on anypath routing and takes advantage of the network coding gain to find out the route with minimal anypath cost reasonably. Meanwhile, it is also a 'multihop' network coding and changes the route with dynamical data loads adaptively. Simulation results demonstrate that HCOR has better performance than coding opportunity-aware routing and also obtains a significant throughput gain in wireless mesh networks.