Novel Joint Network Coding and Scheduling Scheme in Distributed TDMA-Based WMNs

Recently, research has been conducted on network coding (NC) scheme as an alternative mechanism to significantly increase the utilization of valuable resources in multihop wireless mesh networks (WMNs). Time division multiple access (TDMA) based medium access control (MAC) protocols also have been proposed for guaranteeing quality of service (QoS). However, if an appropriate link scheduling for NC is not performed in TDMA-based WMNs, end-to-end (ETE) delay may be increased although an NC gain can be obtained. Thus, we propose a novel joint NC and scheduling scheme to increase network throughput with ETE delay guaranteed. The proposed joint NC and scheduling scheme, which is flow-based one, employs a new concept, 'duplicated allocation followed by resource release: DARR', so that the slots scheduled on a path are sequentially arranged within a frame even when NC is used. From the performance evaluation results, the proposed DARR scheme can not only guarantee sequentiality but also meet delay bound more effectively than conventional sequential link scheduling with NC.