Approaching the Limits in Routing in Power Line Communication Exploiting Network Coding

We address the single-source-destination routing problem in a mesh network with a broadcast channel, time-division multiplexing (TDM) and no spatial reuse, which is a special type of the PLC channel. First, the outer bound on the achievable data rate is evaluated. We show that the routing protocols (RPs) with static routing do not allow approaching this data rate limit. Then, we study RP with opportunistic routing (ORP). We show that its main disadvantage, extensive feedback, can be successively reduced when using Network Coding (NC). We propose the basic routing rules (BRR) based on ORP with NC. Then, we demonstrate that the data rate achievable with BRR approaches the outer bound when the coding window increases. Finally, we provide the simulation results, which prove the concept. In the considered scenarios, BRR allow the data rate up to 10% higher than RPs with static routing, which is just 5-10% away from the theoretical outer bound limit.