Coding-aware and interference-avoid routing metric for wireless mesh networks

Network coding, which exploits the broadcast nature of wireless medium, is an effective way to improve network performance in wireless multi-hop networks, but the first practical wireless network coding system COPE can not actively detect a route with more coding opportunities. This article proposes a coding-aware and interference-avoid routing metric (CIRM) for wireless mesh networks which can achieve a tradeoff between routing multiple flows “close to each other” for more coding opportunities and routing multiple flows “away from each other” to avoid interference. Simulation results show that using our proposed routing metric can find more coding opportunities and effectively increase total network throughput, reduce end to end delay and alleviate network congestion.