Active Network Coding Based High-Throughput Optimizing Routing for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Network coding is often applied to routing protocols for wireless ad hoc networks with the target of improving the throughput and other performance. In most research of network coding, much work has been done on multicast or broadcast applications, and few work gives attention to unicast applications. The most recent work is COPE presented in. Nevertheless, in all the existing network coding methods, nodes passively wait for the straightforward opportunities to network coding, but can´t exploit the potential but not straightforward opportunities to network coding. Therefore this paper introduces ANCHOR, an active network coding based high-throughput optimizing routing protocol, where every node not only exploits the existing opportunities to network coding, but also actively optimizes the routing for exploiting potential but not straightforward opportunities to network coding. We implement ANCHOR in Glomosim simulator, and compare the throughput of ANCHOR, COPE and DSR against different parameters. The extensive results show that ANCHOR outperforms COPE and DSR in many scenarios.