Throughput and fairness-aware dynamic network coding in wireless communication networks

Network Coding (NC) techniques have received a lot of attention from the research community for providing reliable broadcasting in error-prone wireless networks. The most common NC approach is segment coding, in which the packets are partitioned into segments, and linear NC is performed inside each segment. In order to increase the throughput of NC and decrease the decoding delay, dynamic coding schemes have been recently proposed. However, these methods incur many feedback messages. In this paper, we propose two dynamic NC schemes that achieve the maximum throughput and reduce the number of required feedback messages. Moreover, we propose a fair dynamic NC scheme that performs a trade-off between the throughput and the fairness in terms of decoding delay and the number of decodable packets at different destination nodes. Our simulation results show that our proposed dynamic NC method provides the same throughput as the ARQ for Network Coding (ANC) method, with up to 90% less feedback messages. Moreover, our fair dynamic NC can increase decoding delay fairness by about 80%.