INCOR: Inter-flow Network Coding based Opportunistic Routing in wireless mesh networks

Both opportunistic routing and inter-flow network coding are useful mechanisms for improving the performance of wireless networks. Both of them exploit the broadcast nature of the wireless medium and the spatial diversity of multi-hop wireless networks. In this paper, we aim at incorporating interflow network coding into opportunistic routing for further improving the performance of wireless mesh networks (WMNs). The main issue in designing such a scheme is candidate set selection and prioritization based on a proper metric for opportunistic routing. To this end, in this paper, we first present a new metric to determine the prioritization of the forwarders in the set of candidates and then design an Inter-flow Network Coding-based Opportunistic Routing (INCOR) scheme using the defined metric. Our proposed INCOR scheme can integrate the characteristics of inter-flow network coding and opportunistic routing effectively to make full use of the broadcast nature of the wireless medium. We carry out extensive simulations to evaluate the effectiveness of the INCOR method. Our data shows that INCOR outperforms both opportunistic routing and inter-flow network coding schemes.