FlexONC: Joint Cooperative Forwarding and Network Coding With Precise Encoding Conditions

In recent years, network coding has emerged as an innovative method that helps a wireless network approach its maximum capacity by combining multiple unicasts in one broadcast. However, the majority of research conducted in this area is yet to fully utilize the broadcasting nature of wireless networks and still assumes a fixed route between the source and destination that every packet should travel through. This assumption not only limits coding opportunities but can also cause buffer overflow in some specific intermediate nodes. Although some studies considered scattering of the flows dynamically in the network, they still face some limitations. This paper explains pros and cons of some prominent research in network coding and proposes a Flexible and Opportunistic Network Coding Scheme (FlexONC) as a solution to such issues. Furthermore, this research discovers that the conditions used in previous studies to combine packets of different flows are overly optimistic and would affect the network performance adversely. Therefore, we provide a more accurate set of rules for packet encoding. The experimental results show that FlexONC outperforms previous methods especially in networks with high bit error rate, by better utilizing redundant packets spread in the network.