Joint Inter-Flow Network Coding and Opportunistic Routing in Multi-Hop Wireless Mesh Networks: A Comprehensive Survey

Abstract

Network coding and opportunistic routing are two recognized innovative ideas to improve the performance of wireless networks by utilizing the broadcast nature of the wireless medium. In the last decade, there has been considerable research on how to synergize inter-flow network coding and opportunistic routing in a single joint protocol outperforming each in any scenario. This paper explains the motivation behind the integration of these two techniques, and highlights certain scenarios in which the joint approach may even degrade the performance, emphasizing the fact that their synergistic effect cannot be accomplished with a naive and perfunctory combination. This survey paper also provides a comprehensive taxonomy of the joint protocols in terms of their fundamental components and associated challenges, and compares existing joint protocols. We also present concluding remarks along with an outline of future research directions.Inter-flow network coding, opportunistic routing, network coding-aware routing, unicast traffic, multi-hop wireless mesh networks. I. INTRODUCTIONWireless mesh network (WMN) [1], [2] is a type of wireless communication networks aiming to realize the dream of a seamlessly connected world. In mesh infrastructure, radio nodes are connected via wireless links creating a multi-hop wireless network, and nodes can talk to each other and pass data over long distances. This is realized by forming long paths consisting of smaller segments and handing off data over mulitple hops. This cooperative data delivery is the key idea of mesh networks to share connectivity across a large area with inexpensive wireless technologies.Despite these advancements, users' expectations rise fast, and new applications require higher throughput and lower delay [3]. In addition, the performance of wireless networks is significantly restricted by interference, and the unreliability of the wireless channel. Also, it is adversely affected by the contention among different data flows and devices in sharing bandwidth and other network resources. However, since the last decade two promising approaches of "Opportunistic Routing" and "Network Coding" are proved to improve the performance of wireless networks significantly by creatively utilizing the broadcast nature of the wireless medium.Network coding (NC), more specifically inter-flow network coding (IXNC), is the process of forwarding more than one packet in each transmission. Doing so, it increases the "effective" capacity of the network [4] and improves the throughput. Opportunistic routing 1 (OR) also benefits from the broadcast nature of wireless networks via path diversity. In OR, in contrast to traditional forwarding, there is no fixed route, and nodes do not forward a packet to a specified pre-selected next-hop. In fact, a node first broadcasts the packet, and then the next-hop is selected among all neighbors that have received the packet successfully. In addition, as explained in Section II-B, OR can reduce the total number of transmissions by exploiting long but p...

An Adaptive Routing-Forwarding Control Scheme Based on an Intelligent Fuzzy Decision-Making System for Opportunistic Social Networks

“…Referring to the parameter initialization from the paradigm of fuzzy inference system and experimental results, the location and scale parameters are set as a 1 = 0.75, a 2 = 0.5, a 3 = 0.25, and σ 2 1 = σ 2 2 = σ 2 3 = 0.96 from the parameter settings of the 10th experiment. In addition, based on the common settings of the opportunistic network environment, the number of nodes in this communication area N is set as 100, 200, 400 and 600, and the cache space for a node C is set as 10,15,20,25,30,35, and 40 MB. Moreover, because the social attribute information of nodes does not exist in the four real data sets, this simulation defines eight different social characteristics for each node, including interests, occupation, common friends, preferences, browsing history, repost record, comments, and online time.…”

“…As various applicable routing-forwarding strategies [15] have been proposed to tackle the problem of data dissemination for different scenarios in OSNs, most of them make an accurate message delivery decision by comprehensively assessing reliable social information associated with nodes such as social features [6], human mobility [1], contact history [13], or level of credibility. As a general rule, the social features of humans, which can be easily extracted from portable mobile devices, are the most widely utilized metric information for relay node selection in OSNs.…”

Common network coding condition and traffic matching supported network coding aware routing for wireless multihop network

“…Due to the potentials of network coding in improving the performance of wireless multihop network, some network coding-based routings [13][14][15] have been proposed. The network coding applied in routings is network layer network coding, instead of physical layer network coding.…”

Adaptive Wireless Network Coding for Infrastructure Wireless Mesh Networks

“…Besides, in [24] the authors propose FairCoding, which is a cross-layer protocol optimizing the coordination among the network coding and the MAC layer protocols; they observe that FairCoding increases the number of coding opportunities as well as the average transmission rate of WMNs, reaching an improvement of 20%. Finally, in [25] the authors jointly optimize NC and opportunistic routing in WMNs; they also provide a taxonomy of protocols considering both mechanisms.…”