Performance evaluation of route coding scheme in wireless multi-hop networks

Wireless multi-hop networks have been much attention for the future generation mobile communication systems. Due to the possibility of flexible construction in the wireless multi-hop networks, multiple routes from a source node to a destination node can be established. In this paper, we propose the route coding scheme in the wireless multi-hop networks. In the proposed scheme, a packeted data sequence is encoded by the convolutional code at the source node. Each digit of the code word is assigned to sub-packets on multiple routes. At the intermediate nodes, the sub-packets are regenerated-relayed to the next node. The sub-packets transmitted via multiple routes are decoded by the Viterbi decoder with the modified metric computation at the destination node. We also evaluate the system performance, and clarify the improvement of the packet error rate by the proposed scheme. Furthermore, we investigate the influence of the route loss due to topological change or recognizing failure.