Joint routing, scheduling, and network coding for wireless multihop networks

This paper presents a study on achievable throughput in wireless multihop networks with unicast flows that use XOR-like network coding. A joint routing, scheduling, and network coding problem is formulated under a realistic signal to interference plus noise ratio interference model. This formulation provides a mathematical framework to study the achievable throughput of a given wireless network for a given utility function. We optimally solve it for max-min throughput in small to medium size networks by developing an efficient computation tool. Our numerical results show that throughput gains can be obtained at low transmission powers by using simple XOR-like network coding in a mesh-like network provided it is optimally configured in terms of routing, scheduling, and network coding but that they are only significant (i.e., greater than 15%) for some special cases. We also compute max-min throughput by restricting network coding to some key nodes or flows to quantify key conditions that provide a significant portion of gains.