Joint Scheduling and Network Coding for Multicast in Delay-Constrained Wireless Networks

This paper deals with network-coded multicast for real-time and streaming-media applications where packets have explicit expiration deadlines. Most of the popular network coding approaches require asymptotically large block-lengths, thereby incurring long decoding delays. The present paper introduces a joint scheduling and network coding design that aims to maximize the average throughput while respecting the packet deadlines. The novel approach relies on a time-unwrapped graph expansion in order to construct the network codes. The resultant algorithm draws from the well-known augmenting-path algorithm, and is both distributed as well as scalable. For networks with primary interference, a lower-bound on the worst-case performance of the algorithm is provided. The associated optimization problem is also analyzed from an integer programming perspective, and a set of valid inequalities is derived to obtain an upper bound.