Multipath code casting for wireless mesh networks

Designing high throughput wireless mesh networks involves solving interrelated scheduling, routing, and interference problems. In this paper, we exploit the broadcast properties and the path diversity of wireless meshes to implement an efficient multipath routing protocol, Multipath Code Casting (MC²).

In contrast to prior work in opportunistic routing, which required strong coordination across nodes to prevent information repetition, our design is based on network coding and does not require node coordination. Moreover, it provides a unified framework to deal with data transmissions across multiple and, often, unreliable transmission paths. Our design also includes a novel rate-scheduling algorithm that guarantees (proportionally) fair allocation of resources across multiple (multipath) flows, ensures that data use the paths with the best performance, and prevents information overflow by controlling the data rate across each path. Using simulations and a prototype implementation, we show that our algorithms provide over 30% performance improvement compared to traditional singlepath approaches when applied to realistic and other exemplar topologies; in some scenarios, our approach can even double the throughput. Our approach also performs better than 20% compared to other multipath routing schemes.