Universal Opportunistic Routing Scheme Using Network Coding

Recent research has shown that the performance of opportunistic routing and network coding in wireless networks is greatly impacted by the correlation among the links. However, it is difficult to measure the correlation among the links, especially because of the time-varying behavior of the wireless links. Therefore, it is crucial to design a distributed algorithm that does not require the explicit knowledge of the channels' states and can adapt to the varying channel conditions. In this paper, the authors formulate the problem of maximizing the throughput while achieving fairness under arbitrary channel conditions, and they identify the structure of its optimal solution.