Energy-efficient coding-aware routing in energy-constrained wireless networks

Network coding has been considered as an effective strategy for improving the performance of wireless networks. However, most existing work studied network coding based on fixed route. Meanwhile, due to the limitation of the energy capacity of wireless networks, prolonging the network lifetime is a crucial task. For this purpose, this paper introduces an energy-efficient coding-aware routing (EECAR) mechanism, which combines the network coding with energy efficiency. EECAR can detect potential coding opportunities under “two-hop” coding conditions and prolong the network lifetime. Meanwhile, an energy-efficient coding-aware metric, named EECAM, is presented which detects coding opportunities within two-hop neighbors and selects nodes with high remaining energy. Finally, the EECAR mechanism is implemented in ns-2. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed EECAR strategy achieves significant throughput gains and prolongs the network lifetime.