Load Balancing Coding-aware Opportunistic Routing

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) is a kind of Multi-hop, Self-Organized and Self-Management Broadband Network. It has been used in enterprise, campus, hospital, tourism and so on. With the information theory of network regeneration, network coding is applied to wireless networks as a new data process.This paper first introduces the basic architecture and features of WMNs, points out the difficult problems in wireless network routing, and analyzes network coding and opportunistic routing in wireless networks.Existing opportunistic routing strategy based on network coding mechanism COPE mainly focus on finding next hop node who has maximal coding opportunity and then forward the packet to it. However, as this strategy may make the network flow excessively aggregate together at the nodes with high coding opportunity, furthermore, result in the issue that shared channels appear obstructed. Addressing above issues, in this paper, we propose a competitive routing metric LCM that combine with the coding and load indicator of the node, and then design and implement a Load-based opportunistic routing strategy L-COR. The strategy use transmission value of candidate to represent the measurement of node coding, use the time between being queued and being sent out from the node's output queue to represent node load, and make a tradeoff between node coding and node load by actively detecting possible coding opportunities. The simulation results show that L-COR can effectively find coding nodes and keep load balance among nodes, besides, improve more throughput in network. Finally, we summarize what have done in this paper and point what to be done in the future.