Opportunistic routing and network coding in multi-hop wireless mesh networks

Zhang, Chen (2018) Opportunistic routing and network coding in multi-hop wireless mesh networks. Doctoral (PhD) thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

[English] PDF - Accepted Version Available under License - The author retains copyright ownership and moral rights in this thesis. Neither the thesis nor substantial extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's permission. Download (10MB)

Abstract

The rapid advancements in communication and networking technologies boost the capacity of wireless networks. Multi-hop wireless networks are extremely exciting and rapidly developing areas and have been receiving an increasing amount of attention by researchers. Due to the limited transmission range of the nodes, end-to-end nodes may situate beyond direct radio transmission ranges. Intermediate nodes are required to forward data in order to enable the communication between nodes that are far apart. Routing in such networks is a critical issue. Opportunistic routing has been proposed to increase the network performance by utilizing the broadcast nature of wireless media. Unlike traditional routing, the forwarder in opportunistic routing broadcasts date packets before the selection of the next hop. Therefore, opportunistic routing can consider multiple downstream nodes as potential candidate nodes to forward data packets instead of using a dedicated next hop. Instead of simply forwarding received packets, network coding allows intermediate nodes to combine all received packets into one or more coded packets. It can further improve network throughput by increasing the transmission robustness and efficiency. In this dissertation, we will study the fundamental components, related issues and associated challenges about opportunistic routing and network coding in multi-hop wireless networks. Firstly, we focus on the performance analysis of opportunistic routing by the Discrete Time Markov Chain (DTMC). Our study demonstrates how to map packet transmissions in the network with state transitions in a Markov chain. We will consider pipelined data transfer and evaluate opportunistic routing in different wireless networks in terms of expected number of transmissions and time slots. Secondly, we will propose a regional forwarding schedule to optimize the coordination of opportunistic routing. In our coordination algorithm, the forwarding schedule is limited to the range of the transmitting node rather than among the entire set of forwarders. With such an algorithm, our proposal can increase the throughput by deeper pipelined transmissions. Thirdly, we will propose a mechanism to support TCP with opportunistic routing and network coding, which are rarely incorporated with TCP because the frequent occurrences of out-of-order arrivals in opportunistic routing and long decoding delay in network coding overpower TCP congestion control. Our solution completes the control feedback loop of TCP by creating a bridge between the sender and the receiver. The simulation result shows that our protocol significantly outperforms TCP/IP in terms of network throughput in different topologies of wireless networks.

Actions (login required)

View Item