Queuing model and delay analysis on network coding

Network coding has been shown to be an essential way to achieve the maximum capacity afforded by the available multicast backbone networks. However, due to the differences in the characteristics of the links and the data processing capability of the nodes, ideal global synchronization over the entire multicast network is very difficult to realize. As a result, the delay analysis of network coding is of fundamental importance. In this paper, we propose a batch queuing model to characterize the queuing and data processing of the encoding nodes. Based on the model, some theoretical results on the average delay and the average queuing length are obtained, and then verified by simulation. Furthermore, the total delay performances of network coding in a typical network are evaluated and compared with the theoretical estimations.