Practical Coding-Aware Mechanism for Opportunistic Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Opportunistic routing and network coding have been considered as effective strategies for improving the throughput of wireless mesh networks (WMN). However, most existing work studied opportunistic routing and network coding separately. This has largely limited the ability of the above strategies from effectively improving the network performance. To achieve improved network throughput, in this paper, we propose a coding-aware opportunistic routing mechanism for WMNs. The design goal is achieved by effectively integrating the above two strategies such that decision on each packet forwarding is made with the awareness of potential coding opportunities. Simulation results show that our proposed mechanism can remarkably improve the network throughput.