Delay analysis in practical wireless network coding

ABSTRACT Network coding provides a powerful mechanism for improving performance of wireless networks. In this paper, we present an analytical approach for end‐to‐end delay analysis in wireless networks that employs inter‐session network coding. Prior work on performance analysis in wireless network coding mainly focuses on the throughput of the overall network. Our approach aims to analyze the delay of each flow in the network. The theoretical basis of our approach is network calculus. In order to use network calculus to analyze the performance of traffic flows in the network, we have to address three specific problems: identifying traffic flows, characterizing broadcast links, and measuring coding opportunities. We propose solutions for these problems and discuss the practical issues when applying the approach in practice. We make three main contributions. First, we obtain theoretical formulations for computing the queueing delay bounds of traffic flows in wireless networks with network coding. Second, with the formulations, we figure out the factors that affect the queueing delay of a flow and find that first‐in first‐out scheduling cannot fully exploit the benefit of network coding. Third, in order to exploit our findings, we introduce a new scheduling scheme that can improve the performance of current practical wireless network coding. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.