Network Coding in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Worldwide Wireless Mesh Networks have been advocated as cost e ective and robust solution for providing Internet connectivity for the last mile networks. These networks can utilize MR-MC nodes and use 802.11 WLAN technolo- gies for communication. WMNs utilize Ad hoc routing protocols for their communication. This gives them the ability to perform multi hop routing in wireless settings. However these networks frequently face tra c congestion usually near the gateway nodes where a lot of data is held up in uplink and downlink queues. This data has special properties which can be utilized to help improve the throughput of the network and reduce the queues for nodes near the gateway. In recent years many solutions have been proposed to han- dle the situations arising in WMNs. For our proposal we advocate the use of Network Coding for capacity improvement for these networks. Network coding can be applied between routing-MAC layers with little or no modi- cations to the protocols being run at these layers. The concept has been thoroughly examined for single radio single channel settings, and has shown to bring the information capacity of a network closer to its ideal limit. In our study we have shown that the use of network coding improves the uti- lization of multiple channels in MRMC in WMN and proposed an algorithm to improve the opportunity capturing ability of Netcoding operation.