Impact of Network Coding on System Delay for Multisource–Multidestination Scenarios

Existing work has shown that random coding across multicast sessions can significantly reduce system delay. However, such a scheme requires the strong assumption that each source has
priori
information of other sources' messages. The broadcasting nature of radio propagation can provide an opportunity to realize collaboration across sessions without causing much system overhead. In this paper, we propose the application of network coding to multisource-multidestination (MSMD) scenarios and provide formal analysis for the improvement of system delay. In particular, two types of analytical results have been developed, with one based on the outage probability and the other based on the use of practical convolutional codes. Monte Carlo simulation results have also been provided to demonstrate the delay performance of the proposed network-coded protocol.