Low Complexity Network Coding Aware Routing for Wireless Multi-hop Networks

Network coding is a technology with great potentiality in improving wireless multi-hop network throughput. And some routings combined with network coding have been proposed for wireless multi-hop network. In the routings combined with network coding, network coding condition is used to find network coding opportunities, which is very important to the performance improving of routings combined with network coding. However, the network coding conditions defined by existing routings combined with network coding unilaterally focus on the growth of network coding opportunities, which results in the increasing of cost and delay in routing discovery. Moreover, the more flows participating network coding, the higher probability of decoding failure, which degrade the network coding gain. In this paper, low complexity network coding condition (LCNC) is proposed. LCNC only detects two-flows network coding opportunity, and ensures the destination make successful decoding. In addition, the actual network coding gain is designed through analysis of link quality. Network coding opportunity will be ignored in case the actual network coding gain is negative. Based on LCNC, a low complexity network coding aware routing (LNCR) is designed aiming wireless multi-hop network. Simulation results demonstrate that LNCR obtain a balance between network coding gain and routing discovery cost, and can obtain higher network throughput when the network load is high compared with the classical network coding aware routings.