Research Of Network Coding Based Routing Protocol For Wireless Mesh Network

As the basis architecture for the next generation mobile Internet, Wireless mesh network (WMN) is a high–speed and high-capacity distributive network with the advantages of self-organization, self-configuration and self-healing. However, the performance of WMN is vulnerable to various outside influences, such as signal interference, unstable wireless channel, limited network bandwidth and so on. Emerging as a novel coding mechanism, Network coding allows intermediate nodes to encode the information flows from multiple links as a single code flow, which has greatly increased the information transmitted every time so as to enhance the overall performance of the network. Nowadays, the implement of network coding in wireless mesh network has become the research hotspot.Despite the availability of many routing protocols for Ad-hoc networks, the design of routing protocols for WMN is still an active research area without uniform standards. Besides, the scarcity of rate adaption mechanism in the MAC layer of the WMN leading to fact that nodes are not able to change the transmission rate dynamically in line with the channel qualities. On the basis of the analysis of various WMN routing protocols available, MAC layer rate adaption mechanisms and the principles of network coding, a WMN routing protocol TRANC integrated with network coding is proposed. Each node makes the routing decision according to the characters of data transmission and the wireless link quality, making full use of the transmission capacity of idle nodes in the network, which effectively reduces the communication costs between nodes, as well as the probability of packet duplication. Then, TRANC is realized in the NS-2 simulation software. Finally, four different topologies are modeled and emulated in NS-2. Simulations show TRANC can effectively improve the network throughput with a lower end to end delay.