Delay constrained throughput-reliability tradeoff in network-coded wireless systems

We investigate the performance of delay constrained data transmission over wireless networks without end-to-end feedback. Forward error-correction coding (FEC) is performed at the bit level to combat channel distortions and random linear network coding (RLNC) is performed at the packet level to recover from packet erasures. We focus on the scenario where RLNC re-encoding is performed at intermediate nodes and we assume that any packet that contains bit errors after FEC decoding can be detected and erased. To facilitate explicit characterization of data transmission over network-coded wireless systems, we propose a generic two-layer abstraction of a network that models both bit/symbol-level operations at the lower layer (termed PHY-layer) over several heterogeneous links and packet-level operations at the upper layer (termed NET-layer). Based on this model, we propose a network reduction method to characterize the throughput-reliability function of the end-to-end transmission. Our approach not only reveals an explicit tradeoff between data delivery rate and reliability, but also provides an intuitive visualization of the bottlenecks within the underlying network. We illustrate our approach via a point-to-point link and a relay network and highlight the advantages of this method over capacity-based approaches.