ICM: A Novel Coding-Aware Metric for Multi-Hop Wireless Routing

Using the intrinsic broadcast property of the wireless medium, network coding has become an important technology in the area of wireless networks. Network coding needs multiple flows to gather together which will contribute to interference between these flows and decrease the transmission utilization. In this paper, we investigate the relation between coding and interference in multi-hop wireless networks and illustrate tradeoff between performance degradation of interference and performance gain of coding. We first summarize the coding technology and propose a coding rule. Then, we combine the interference cost and coding gain to form the interference-avoid and coding-aware metric (ICM). Finally, we conclude that network performance including network throughput and end-to-end delay can be greatly improved by using ICM.