A Case for Joint Routing, Scheduling, and Network Coding in TDMA-based Wireless Mesh Networks: A Cross-layer Approach

Network coding has been successfully applied to contemporary wireless Mesh networks (WMNs) to reduce intra-network interference and enhance the capacity of the WMN. State-of-the-art WMNs, however, introduce features such as explicit per-link bandwidth reservation and per-link encryption, which make the application of prior network coding approaches in these WMNs suboptimal, if not impossible. In this paper we look at the above challenge from a new perspective and present efficient heuristics for tackling the joint QoS routing, scheduling, and network coding problem. An experimental evaluation shows that the designed heuristics are able to yield excellent solutions in real-time, even if we assume dynamically changing traffic in the WMN.