Route switching protocol for network coding in ad hoc networks

Distributed Coding-Aware Routing (DCAR) is a routing protocol to choose of path with the use of network coding and improves throughput. However, DCAR considers network coding only when a path is newly built, and the existing path is fixed. Therefore, when there are multiple paths, DCAR considers whether network coding can be applied or not by fixing the existing path, so there is a problem that throughput decreases. In this paper, we propose a routing protocol that improves the throughput by switching the path that allows network coding to be applied while not limited on existing path. In our proposed scheme, each node discovers the path by considering the possibility of applying network coding by using the path information and Route Request (RREQ) packet, and the protocol switches the existing path to the path which network coding can be applied when necessary. Our proposed scheme applies network coding without depending on the existing path and improves throughput. By the simulation with NS-2, we evaluate the throughput of DCAR and the proposed scheme. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme improves the throughput.