Improving Network Coding-aware Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks Using Fuzzy Logic

Network coding is an effective approach for improving the performance of wireless networks, such that a new generation of routing protocols, known as network coding-aware protocols, recognize coding opportunities during their route discovery process, and try to establish routes containing appropriate coding opportunities. Most of the research works being done around this type of routing, only try to maximize the number of coding opportunities along data transmission route. However, merely considering coding opportunities, may decrease the optimality and the throughput of routes, since sometimes, by considering only the number of coding opportunities without paying attention to the quality of links along routes, the quality of detected routes will be decreased. In this paper, in order to resolve the deficiencies of previously related works, a new network coding-aware routing protocol based on fuzzy logic is proposed, such that the delay of links besides the satus of all nodes along different paths are evaluated through utilizing fuzzy logic, and the overall value of all paths are determined. Finally, paths wirh better status in terms of the quality of links and nodes, are selected for data transmission. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol has better performance than previous approaches, in terms of throughput, packet delivery ratio, and delay.