An Efficient Approach to Coding-Aware Routing

Abstract

Network coding is an emerging technology that intelligently exploits the store/forward nature of routers to increase the efficiency of the network. Though the concept works in theory, the segregation of coding and routing decisions makes them inapplicable in almost any practical environment. Coding-aware routing takes the network coding a step further to lessen its disadvantages by allowing interlayer communication while making routing decisions. However, most of the existing work exploits coding benefits only for fixed wireless networks, making them dependent on the types of network medium, topology and mobility and thus inapplicable for wired and mobile Ad Hoc networks. The aim of this thesis is to present a generalized algorithm that can detect any possible coding opportunity in a network of any medium, topology and mobility while making routing decisions. We have tested and evaluated our algorithm in six different network topology settings i.e. small wired, big wired, small Ad Hoc network with regular trajectories, big Ad Hoc network with regular trajectories, small Ad Hoc with random trajectories and big Ad Hoc with random trajectories. Improved performance in network throughput, mean queue size and mean end-to-end delay confirms the validity of our algorithm.