Throughput enhancement in wireless mesh networks using local topology aided network coding

This dissertation presents the design, testbed implementation and evaluation of XOR-Top, a protocol that uses local topology information for network coding for unicast transmission in wireless mesh networks. One of the main constraints in a wireless mesh network is limited bandwidth. Network coding has shown great potential to improve the overall throughput of wireless networks with broadcast nature. In this dissertation, we have harnessed the benefits of network coding to improve the network throughput of a wireless mesh network which uses a omnidirectional broadcast. We have validated our network encoding scheme through simulation and evaluated our proposed scheme on a IEEE-802.11 b based wireless mesh network testbed. The testbed implementation uses off-the-shelf hardware and software.In this work, we implement and evaluate a new encoding strategy, XOR-Top, which relies on local topology information, and uses bitwise XOR for packet coding. We have compared our proposed approach with conventional unicast and COPE. COPE is the first testbed implementation of network coding for unicast transmission in a wireless mesh network. Compared with COPE, XOR-Top can always efficiently identify coding opportunities according to local topology. XOR-Top is applicable to any multihop wireless network if each node has knowledge of local topology and a routing table.In essence, we can say that in this dissertation we have studied local topology assisted network coding, designed a new protocol (XOR-Top), verified the correctness of the new coding schemes by simulation as well as experimental testbed and completed the performance analysis of data collected by simulation and experiments.