Improving network coding in wireless ad hoc networks

Wireless ad hoc networks usually have lower network throughput than wireless infrastructure networks due to the inherent nature of multi-hop communication on a shared channel in wireless ad hoc networks. Network coding is a method that can improve the network throughput by reducing the amount of workload in the network while still ensuring that all user data is transferred. With network coding, a node can improve its transmission efficiency by combining (encoding) several packets together and sending only the resultant encoded packet if the coding conditions are satisfied. In this paper, we propose the Network Coding Routing (NCRT) protocol which consists of a new set of coding conditions, and a new routing metric that takes into consideration both coding opportunities and network workload. Comprehensive simulation studies showed that NCRT gives promising performance.