Backbone Routing over Multihop Wireless Networks: Increased Network Coding Opportunity

Network coding has been proved as an effective way to enhance the throughput of the multihop wireless ad hoc networks in both unicast and multicast traffics. However, in a random network topology with non-coding-aware routing protocols, the performance enhancement may be limited because the packet routing scheme does not take advantage of the possibility of network coding. In this paper, we propose a Backbone ROuting with Network Coding (BRONC) scheme over a multihop wireless network, which combines the benefits of both backbone routing and network coding techniques. With backbone-based routing, all packets are forced to be transmitted over a constructed backbone. Because of the characteristics of bi-directional traffic flow and pre-specified routes in backbone routing, the possibility of coding packets at intermediate nodes can be substantially increased, and thus the benefit of network coding is fully exploited. Simulation results show that BRONC improves the coding opportunity significantly, and it outperforms the existing opportunistic coding schemes in terms of throughput, packet delivery ratio and transmission overhead.