CARTA: Coding-Aware Routing via Tree-Based Address

Network coding-aware routing has become an effective paradigm to improve network throughput and relieve network congestion. However, to detect coding opportunities and make routing decision for a data flow, most existing XOR coding-aware routing methods need to consume much overhead to collect overhearing information on its possible routing paths. In view of this, we propose low-overhead and dynamic Coding-Aware Routing via Tree-based Address (CARTA) for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In CARTA, a Multi-Root Multi-Tree Topology (MRMTT) with a tree-based address allocation mechanism is firstly constructed to provide transmission paths for data flows. Then, a low-overhead coding condition judgment method is provided to detect real-time coding opportunities via tree address calculation in the MRMTT. Further, CARTA defines routing address adjustments caused by encoding and decoding to ensure the flows’ routing paths can be adjusted flexibly according to their real-time coding opportunities. It also makes additional constraints on congestion and hop count in the coding condition judgment to relieve network congestion and control the hop counts of routing paths. The simulation results verify that CARTA can utilize more coding opportunities with less overhead on coding, and this is ultimately beneficial for promoting network throughout and balancing energy consumption in WSNs.