Distributed Greedy Coding-aware Deterministic Routing for multi-flow in wireless networks

As one of the compelling performance improvement techniques, network coding is widely used for designing routing protocols in wireless networks. Specifically, in deterministic routing, coding benefit is viewed as an important factor for distributed route selection. However, most of the existing deterministic routing protocols only detect two-flow coding opportunities in the route discovering phase, but the multi-flow scenario is not researched sufficiently. It is obvious that multi-flow coding can improve the coding benefit in complex network environments. In this paper, we analyze the challenges of the multi flow coding, and propose a Distributed Greedy Coding-aware Deterministic Routing (DGCDR) for multi flow in wireless networks. To increase the potential coding opportunities, a decoding policy and a coding condition are defined in the multi-flow environment, which exploit the coding benefit of multiple intersecting flows in a greedy way. Meanwhile, considering the interference introduced by multi-flow coding, we design an extra confirmation process in our protocol. Furthermore, to enhance the flexibility of packet delivery and coding, we propose a greedy aggregation mechanism and a greedy coding algorithm. From the simulation results, we can find that DGCDR can induce a competitive performance in terms of increased coding benefit, decreased delay, larger throughput, and smaller queue size. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.