A Cross-Layer Optimization Mechanism for Inter-session Network Coding in Wireless Mesh Network

Network coding is an efficient technique to improve the throughput of wireless network. It is observed that there exists short period unfairness when nodes are competing for the wireless channels, which will decrease the opportunity of inter-session network coding in WMN(Wireless Mesh Network). A coding-aware cross-layer optimization mechanism is proposed in this paper. In the proposed mechanism, the priorities of coding flows were calculated in relay nodes according to the packet number of these flows in the forward queue, and the values of the priorities were sent to the corresponding upstream nodes to adjust their MAC parameters. Experiments and simulation results show that the proposed mechanism can balance the traffic of coding flows in the relay nodes in a short period and create more coding opportunities. As a result, it will improve the total throughput of wireless mesh network.