BEND-aware routing optimization in wireless mesh networks

Network coding is a new communication paradigm which allows network nodes not only to forward packets but also to combine them together to reduce the number of transmissions. COPE has been the first network coding scheme designed for unicast traffic in wireless networks. COPE-based network coding-aware routing optimization has been proposed to improve network performances. However, it is interesting to study network coding-aware routing optimization using other network coding schemes to analyze the impact of coding conditions. In this paper, we study the problem of network coding-aware routing optimization using BEND, an extension of COPE. We model the coding structures of BEND and integrate them into the routing optimization problem. The simulation results show that BEND-aware routing can improve network throughput by creating more coding structures than COPE.