A Load-Balanced Route Selection for Network Coding in Wireless Mesh Networks

COPE appears as the first wireless network coding approach which can improve the throughput of Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). But the established routes in COPE may result in fairly limited coding opportunities and low throughput gain. Although excessive intersections of flows can bring forth more coding opportunities, they may make some nodes overloaded, and decrease the throughput. Furthermore, detecting coding opportunities may induce the high routing delay. To solve these problems, we propose HLCR, a heuristic load-balanced coding-aware routing mechanism, and its novel path metric called Heuristic Path Metric for Coding and Load-balancing (HPMCL) in WMNs. HPMCL evaluates a path considering network load, expected number of transmissions and potential coding opportunities. Thus HLCR can efficiently find high throughput paths having coding opportunities and achieve good load balance with low cost by the HPMCL metric and other effective measures. Our simulation results in ns-2 show that HLCR scheme can gain higher network throughput compared with COPE.