Multipath Code Casting for Wireless Mesh Networks

Designing high throughput wireless mesh networks is a challenge, and involves solving interrelated scheduling, routing, and interference problems. In this paper, we exploit the fundamental properties of broadcast medium and path diversity in wireless meshes to implement multipath routing between a source and destination pair. We use network coding for a given unicast source-destination flow to ease the scheduling problem, exploit diversity, and deal with unreliable transmissions. We describe multipath-forwarding algorithms, and show their performance benefits over existing proposals, using simulation, analysis, and a prototype implementation on a small testbed. We propose a rate-scheduling protocol that relies on network coding, which gives over 30% performance improvement for a realistic topology and can double the throughput in certain cases.