Genetic Algorithm Based Coding Aware Routing for Wireless Mesh Networks

Network coding has been confirmed as a potential technology to improve performance of wireless mesh networks (WMNs) and a few network coding aware routings have been proposed. However, these mechanisms detect coding opportunities through local traffic pattern checking, which hardly obtains optimal routes. This paper proposes a Genetic algorithm based Coding Aware Routing (GCAR) for wireless mesh networks, which employs genetic algorithm to optimize routes and coding opportunities. In addition, the key ingredients in GCAR, e.g., chromosome representation, genetic operation of crossover and mutation, fitness function considering coding opportunity and interference, are carefully designed. Through simulations on a randomly generated wireless mesh network, GCAR is shown to find optimal routes within a short time, and achieve more improvements than the previously proposed methods on route setup time, throughput and load balancing.