Throughput-Gain Analysis of Network Coding in Multi-Channel Multi-Radio Wireless Networks

Wireless network coding (NC) has emerged as a promising technology that improves network throughput and spectrum efficiency. How large can the coding gain be? In this paper, we study the network throughput gains of two types of wireless NC schemes, the conventional wireless NC and the analog NC, respectively, over the traditional non-NC scheme in multi-hop, multi-channel, and multi-radio wireless networks. In particular, we propose an analytical framework, which can exploit the best coding opportunities among all the possible realistic ones, for deriving the network throughput gains of the wireless NC schemes. By solving the problem of maximizing the network throughput subject to the fairness requirements under our proposed framework, we quantitatively analyze the network throughput gains of these two types of wireless NC schemes under various wireless network topologies.