A high-throughput routing protocol based on network coding for Wireless Mesh Networks

Taking into account the broadcast characteristic of wireless medium and high-throughput demand in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs), a novel Coding and Interference Aware Routing (CIAR) protocol has been proposed in this paper. In the proposed CIAR protocol, routing decisions are made aware of both coding gains and interference impact. Based on the physical interference model and Modified Queue length (MQL), the CIAR metric is designed. The CIAR protocol proactively creates opportunities in the process of path establishment, and simultaneously selects the appreciate path with less interference to avoid congestion and balance load. This CIAR protocol can well make the tradeoff between routing choices that facilitate more coding gains and routing choices that mitigate interference level. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed CIAR protocol performs better in terms of average end-to-end throughput, average end-to-end delay and buffer overflow probability than traditional schemes.