CAMR: Network Coding-Aware Multicast Routing Protocol in Wireless Mesh Networks

Network coding is a new paradigm for improving the network throughput, which can achieve the network multicast capacity. It is significant for further availability of Mesh networks to apply network coding to Mesh networks. Network coding-aware routing protocol is a protocol that can fully identify and take advantage of the network coding opportunities in wireless network. Although there are a few network coding based unicast routing protocols, the network coding opportunities in wireless network can not be sufficiently identified and utilized by them. Research and applied design of coding-aware routing protocol in wireless network is also a hot topic. In fact, there are few coding-aware multicast routing protocols so far. In this paper, a coding-aware multicast routing protocol(CAMR) is proposed. CAMR exploits a novel routing metric called coding-aware routing metric(CAM) to measure the network coding opportunity and coding capability of Mesh node. The proposed protocol CAMR based on metric CAM can fully discover and leverage the existing network coding opportunities of the Mesh networks. As a result, the multicast throughput of Mesh networks is further enhanced. Extensive simulation results show the advantage and the validity of performance of CAMR protocol.