Coding-Aware Transmission Scheduling Mechanism for Wireless Multi-Hop Networks

Recently, inter-session opportunistic network coding has been considered as a promising technology for improving the performance of a wireless multi-hop network (WMN). However, most existing work in this field did not consider the issue of how the wireless medium is accessed could largely affect the performance of localized network coding. In this paper, we theoretically analyze the throughput improvement obtained by combining network coding and transmission scheduling in a WMN. Then we formulate the optimal throughput problem as a minimum length scheduling problem subject to potential coding opportunities and coding based transmission conflict constraints. We further propose a distributed coding aware transmission scheduling mechanism for WMNs. Simulation results show that our proposed mechanism can remarkably improve the network throughput as compared with existing work.