Performance Evaluation of CANCAR Algorithm in Realistic Wireless Mesh Networks

Approaches for increasing the network throughput and thus enhancing the performance of wireless mesh networks are one of the key challenges. Network Coding (NC) offers a way to improve on the network performance, by sharing network resources. With the additional approaches, where routing decisions are made with the awareness of coding capabilities and opportunities, the performance of NC can be further improved. As shown in this paper, in the case of proposed proactive routing procedure CANCAR (Congestion-Avoidance Network Coding-Aware Routing), which takes into account the coding awareness along with the information of the measured traffic coding success, it can be efficiently used to support the congestion avoidance and enable more encoded packets, thus indirectly increasing the network throughput. Comprehensive evaluation of CANCAR in realistic simulation environments confirms that the performance in terms of network goodput is notably improved in comparison to COPE. In addition, we showed that the accurate use of measured coding success information for congestion-avoidance routing improves the network performance and has the potential to increase the number of encoded packets. Furthermore, the CANCAR also enables the fairer share of system resources according to the Jain’s fairness index.