Coding based opportunistic routing in ad hoc networks

In this work, we focus on the unicast routing issue in ad hoc networks. Our aim is to design a protocol so that the average number of transmissions for the communication between two end nodes is minimized. Opportunistic routing can reduce the number of transmissions taking advantage of the broadcast nature in wireless networks. In ad hoc networks, different unicast flows may intersect at a relay node and bring coding opportunities. In this paper, we proposed an efficient heuristic coding strategy and applied it in opportunistic routing to reduce the number of transmissions. Extensive simulations are conducted to show that our protocol outperforms ExOR protocol.