Optimal scheduling with network coding for relay-aided wireless broadcast

This paper considers the problems of minimizing the completion time and reducing decoding complexity for relay-aided wireless broadcast. Both network coding and scheduling problems are considered. A deterministic network coding algorithm is designed to select innovative encoding vectors, which is applicable to both base station and relay. Compared with random linear network coding, the proposed algorithm can reduce decoding complexity significantly by selecting sparse encoding vectors. Integrating with the proposed network coding algorithm, a scheduling scheme based on dynamic programming is proposed, which is proved to be optimal in terms of minimizing expected completion time. Simulation shows that the proposed network coding algorithm and scheduling scheme work very well on both reducing completion time and decoding complexity.