A Constrained Coding-Aware Routing Scheme in Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks

In wireless multi-hop networks, instead of using the traditional store-and-forward method, the relay nodes can exploit the network coding idea to encode and transmit the packets in the distributed coding-aware routing (DCAR) mechanisms, which can decrease the transmission number and achieve higher throughput. However, depending on the primary coding conditions of DCAR, the DCAR-type schemes may not only detect more coding opportunities, but also lead to an imbalanced distribution of the network load. Especially, they are not energy efficient in more complex scenarios, such as wireless ad-hoc networks. In this paper, to solve these shortcomings, we propose a constrained coding-aware routing (CCAR) mechanism with the following benefits: (1) by the constrained coding conditions, the proposed mechanism can detect good coding opportunities and assure a higher decoding probability; (2) we propose a tailored “routing + coding” discovery process, which is more lightweight and suitable for the CCAR scheme; and (3) by evaluating the length of the output queue, we can estimate the states of coding nodes to improve the efficient coding benefit. To those ends, we implement the CCAR scheme in different topologies with the ns-2 simulation tool. The simulation results show that a higher effective coding benefit ratio can be achieved by the constrained coding conditions and new coding benefit function. Moreover, the CCAR scheme has significant advantages regarding throughput, average end-to-end delay, and energy consumption.