HyCare: Hybrid Coding-Aware Routing with ETOX Metric in Multi-hop Wireless Networks

Network coding has been shown to improve the performance of the multi-hop wireless networks, by taking advantage of the "mix and broadcast" style communication. In this work, we explore coding-aware routing to further improve end-to-end throughput in the multi-hop wireless networks. A heuristic routing metric ETOX and a novel routing framework HyCare are proposed to route the packets when inter-session network coding protocol is incorporated. Using Network Locality as a heuristic, ETOX homogenizes coding opportunities with other measurements into routes selection. Different from previous attempts on such kind of design, e.g., ERC, ETOX is an unconditional link metric that can be used in many existing routing protocols. It is included in our proposed hybrid routing framework HyCare, which possesses both link-state routing and reverse forwarding functionality. While HyCare can work as an independent routing protocol, it can also collaborate with underlying network coding protocol so as to acquire more accurate ETOX values. Extensive performance evaluation shows significant enhancement for different settings, thereby validating our design methodology.