Joint Opportunistic Routing and Intra-Flow Network Coding in Multi-Hop Wireless Networks: A Survey

Opportunistic routing and network coding are two promising techniques that have been proposed for wireless networks. These techniques have significantly improved the performance of multi-hop wireless networks by utilizing the broadcast nature of wireless media and optimizing the capacity of lossy wireless networks. Recent research has shown that the combination of opportunistic routing and network coding in a single joint protocol outperforms each of them individually. This article explains the motivation and interaction effect of the joint protocols. We provide a taxonomy of joint protocols and illustrate the benefit and cost by highlighting their fundamental components and comparing different solutions. We also present a conclusion along with the outline of future research direction.