FENC: Fast and efficient opportunistic network coding in wireless networks

Network coding is a newly developed technology that can cause considerable improvements in network throughput. COPE is the first network coding approach for wireless mesh networks and it is based on opportunistic Wireless Network Coding (WNC). It significantly improves throughput of multi-hop wireless networks utilizing network coding and broadcast features of wireless medium. In this paper we propose a new method, called FENC, for opportunistic WNC that improves the network throughput. In addition, its complexity is lower than other opportunistic WNC approaches. FENC utilizes division and conquer method to find an optimal network coding. The numerical results show that the proposed opportunistic algorithm improves the overall throughput as well as network coding approach.