Joint rate selection and wireless network coding for time critical applications

In this paper, we dynamically select the transmission rate and design wireless network coding to improve the quality of services such as delay for time critical applications. With low transmission rate, and hence longer transmission range, more packets may be encoded together, which increases the coding opportunity. However, low transmission rate may incur extra transmission delay, which is intolerable for time critical applications. We design a novel joint rate selection and wireless network coding (RSNC) scheme with delay constraint, so as to minimize the total number of packets that miss their deadlines at the destination nodes. We prove that the proposed problem is NP-hard, and propose a novel graph model and transmission metric which consider both the heterogenous transmission rates and the packet deadline constraints during the graph construction. Using the graph model, we mathematically formulate the problem and design an efficient algorithm to determine the transmission rate and coding strategy for each transmission. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the RSNC scheme.