Abstract:Recently opportunistic routing and network coding are two promising technology to achieve significant performance gain by exploring broadcast nature. Comparing with traditional static routing decision strategies, opportunistic routing can mitigate the impact of wireless loss link owing to its dynamical and opportunistic route selection. Network coding can improve network resource utilization. Coding opportunities lie on the co-location of multiple concurrent flows. To create more coding opportunities and improve network throughput, we propose a novel Opportunistic Routing with inter-flow Network Coding (ORNC) algorithm. In ORNC, opportunistic route selection of the each packet forwarding is in a practical network coding-aware manner, and employs backpressure policy to balance the network load when without coding opportunity. The simulation results show that ORNC can achieve a remarkable improvement in terms of the network throughput in multi-hop wireless networks.