Optimizing Coding-Aware Routing in Wireless Networks

Network coding is a technique where, instead of simply relaying the packets of information they receive, the nodes of a network will take several packets and combine them together for transmission. This can be used to attain the maximum possible information flow in a network. Network coding is a networking technique in which transmitted data is encoded and decoded to increase network throughput, reduce delays and make the network more robust. In network coding, algebraic algorithms are applied to the data to accumulate the various transmissions. The received transmissions are decoded at their destinations. This means that fewer transmissions are required to transmit all the data. The practical wireless network coding system was called as COPE which demonstrated the throughput gain achieved by network coding. However, COPE has two fundamental limitations: 1) the coding opportunity is crucially dependent on the established routes and 2) the coding structure in COPE is limited within a two-hop region only. In order to overcome COPE's limitations, Distributed Coding-Aware Routing (DCAR) was proposed but still DCAR fails to handle the situation of link or node failure of a 'coding' node. The proposed system will handle the situation of link/node failure of a 'coding' node using 'Backward Explicit Failure Notification' (BEFN) and also will improve the performance by using AODV protocol.