Deadline-Aware Opportunistic Network Coding for Multi-Relay-Aided Single-Source Single-Destination Network

An opportunistic network coding (NC) scheme is proposed for the multi-relay-aided single-source single-destination network with transmission deadline. With the help of matrix analysis, the lower bound of decoding failure probability of the proposed scheme is given. Simulation results show that: 1) the proposed scheme outperforms NC based on direct recoding scheme and the lower bound is tight when the source-to-relay channel erasure probability is relatively small and 2) given fixed network parameters, the optimal number of systematic packets delivered within deadline could be determined by using the derived bound for maximizing the throughput.