Fault-tolerant routing mechanism based on network coding in wireless mesh networks

As an essential part of next generation Internet, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have attracted much research attention due to their potential advantages, including low up-front cost, ease of deployment, enhanced capacity and service coverage. However, the inherit features of wireless channels (e.g., interference, noise, fading and limited bandwidth) have put forward a severe challenge for network reliability. Conventional fault-tolerant techniques either waste too many bandwidth resources or postpone the recovery speed. This paper proposes a random linear network coding based fault-tolerant routing mechanism to instantaneously recover the native packets omitted by the source. This mechanism couples the multi-path routing and random linear network coding technique by improving the conventional method of coding nodes selection. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed fault-tolerant routing mechanism, which includes Random linear Network Coding in Multi-path with Source Coding (RNCM-SC) and Random linear Network Coding in Multi-path with Source Forwarding (RNCM-SF), perform better in terms of packet delivery ratio, resource redundancy degree, end-to-end delay and useful throughput ratio than the traditional method. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.