Minimum Broadcast Decoding Delay for Generalized Instantly Decodable Network Coding

In this paper, we introduce the concept of generalized instantly decodable network coding (G-IDNC) to further minimize decoding delay in wireless broadcast, compared to strict instantly decodable network coding (S-IDNC), studied in. G-IDNC loosens the strict instant decodability constraint in order to target more receivers while preserving the attractive properties of S-IDNC. We show that the minimum decoding delay problem for G-IDNC can be formulated as a maximum weight clique problem over a well structured graph. Since finding the maximum weight clique of a graph is NP-hard, we design a simple heuristic G-IDNC algorithm with sub-optimal performance. However, simulation results show that both proposed optimal and heuristic G-IDNC algorithms considerably outperform several other S-IDNC and G-IDNC optimal and heuristic approaches.