A novel method for improving the throughput of wireless network coding using opportunistic routing

Routing is a critical issue in telecommunication networks. In routing algorithms, the changes in data packets by intermediate nodes are not allowed. Network coding is a new method for data transmission in telecommunication networks which has advantages such as the improvement in network performance and throughput. In this method, intermediate nodes send a combining code of incoming packets to the destination node. Opportunistic routing has the potential to substantially increase wireless network throughput. In this approach, no node is selected as the intermediate node, and each node which receives the data can transfer them to the destination. In this paper, a method is proposed based on opportunistic routing in network coding to increase the throughput of wireless networks. In the proposed method, the random linear coding of forwarding packets from a source is used; and decoding of the packets is not required in all intermediate nodes. In addition, a fixed path is not considered for data transmission and opportunistic routing is used. The performance of proposed methods is simulated using simulator NS-2 and compared with COPE and EXOR. The simulation results show that the proposed method improves the network throughput.