Performance Evaluation and Optimization of NCOR Methods in Wireless Mesh Networks Network Coding Opportunistic Routing (NCOR) methods are novel routing methods which can fit the broadcast nature of wireless mesh networks better. They can use the multi-user diversity advantage of the wireless channel and throughput gain of network coding method to alleviate the problems of reliability and capacity of Wireless Mesh Networks. This paper investigates and compares throughput and delay performance of NCOR methods and traditional routing method against varying network load based on NS2 network simulator. The fairness between NCOR and traditional routing methods when they coexist is also investigated. Pointing at problems found in simulations, an optimized rate control method for NCOR method is presented to improve throughput, delay performance and fairness of Wireless Mesh Networks.