Power savings of cyclic network coding for multicast on wireless networks

We study power requirements of network coding on a network with broadcast links, for a given multicast session. A common approach to network coding is to extract a subgraph from the network, to which network coding is applied. In order to facilitate network encoding, it is possible to impose the constraint that this subgraph is acyclic. However, in a network based on wireless broadcast links, it is more power efficient to allow cycles in the subgraph, at the expense of a slight increase in the encoding complexity.