CORE: COPE with MORE in Wireless Meshed Networks

State-of-the-art in network coding for wireless, meshed networks typically considers two problems separately. First, the problem of providing reliability for a single session. Second, the problem of opportunistic combination of flows by using minimalistic coding, i.e., by XORing packets from different flows. Instead of maintaining these approaches separate, we propose a protocol (CORE) that brings together these coding mechanisms. Our protocol uses random linear network coding (RLNC) for intra- session coding but allows nodes in the network to setup inter- session coding regions where flows intersect. Routes for unicast sessions are agnostic to other sessions and setup beforehand, CORE will then discover and exploit intersecting routes. Our approach allows the inter-session regions to leverage RLNC to compensate for losses or failures in the overhearing or transmitting process. Thus, we increase the benefits of XORing by exploiting the underlying RLNC structure of individual flows. This goes beyond providing additional reliability to each individual session and beyond exploiting coding opportunistically. Our numerical results show that CORE outperforms both forwarding and COPE-like schemes in general. More importantly, we show gains of up to 4 fold over COPE-like schemes in terms of transmissions per packet in one of the investigated topologies.