On the Queueing Behavior of Network Coding

To deploy network coding (NC) in the Internet core, one difficulty is the selection of coding routers, which largely relies on the understanding of the queueing behavior of NC. In this paper, we build a queueing model to analyze the performance of NC under a bounded maximum opportunistic delay and try to answer several fundamental questions: under what condition is the system stable? how many packets could be possibly coded? what is the quantitative relationship among the traffic arrival rate, the service rate, and the coding opportunities when traffic arrivals and service are both stochastic?