Network coding has been considered as one of the effective strategies that improve the throughput of multihop wireless networks.In order to effectively apply network coding techniques to the real multi-hop wireless networks,a practical network coding aware routing protocol is proposed in this paper,for unicast sessions in multihop wireless networks.The protocol is based on a novel routing metric design that captures the characteristics of network coding and unicast sessions.To ensure the novel routing metric can operate with practical and widely available path calculation algorithms,a unique mapping process is used to map a real wireless network to a virtual network.The mapping process ensures that the paths with the biggest coding opportunities will be selected by commonly used path calculation algorithms.Simulation results show that the proposed routing protocol is effective to improve the network throughput.