How to discover the coding opportunity for practical wireless network coding?

Coding opportunity is crucial to the practical XOR coding scheme which can utilize these opportunities to improve the throughput of wireless networks. While the coding opportunity discovery scheme has been proposed for link-state routing protocols, there still lacks fundamental analysis on how to discover the coding opportunity effectively. In the paper we introduce the importance of coding opportunity discovery. Then in pursuit of generality we theoretically analyze the condition that all the coding opportunities can be discovered when relay node has a chance to transmit. This condition fits into not only link-state routing protocols but also distance-vector ones. In addition, we present how to implement the condition for Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol which is a representative distance-vector one. Our results can be particularly useful for coding-related routing protocol design and analysis.