CoAOR: An efficient network coding aware opportunistic routing mechanism for wireless mesh networks

This paper proposes an efficient network coding aware opportunistic routing mechanism (CoAOR) for wireless mesh networks (WMNs). A new coding gain function is proposed for forwarder selection, which takes into account the number of flows considered in an encoded packet, the link quality, and the number of nodes that are able to decode an encoded packet. The weights of the three parameters in the function are generated using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method. Based on the coding gain function and the local information obtained at each node, CoAOR looks for the nodes with more coding opportunities and tends to choose them as the forwarders of a packet. Simulation results show that CoAOR can significantly improve the performance in terms of the network throughput and the average processing time for forwarding a packet as compared with existing CAOR (or CORE).