Opportunistic Scheduling for Wireless Network Coding

This paper addresses a scheduling problem for wireless network coding which has been recently proposed as a novel method to enhance the throughput in wireless networks. The wireless network coding involves broadcast transmission of a network-coded packet which contains unicast data to several receiving nodes. These receiving nodes have time-varying fading links to the transmitting node, which can generate different instantaneous conditions for different links. In this paper, we introduce an opportunistic scheduling for such a wireless network coding, which selects a set of nodes whose packets are network - coded as well as the data rate for the broadcast transmission according to the instantaneous link conditions. We analyze the average capacity of such a scheduling, and discuss the impact of different parameters on the average capacity. We show that the opportunistic scheduling can maximize the average capacity by choosing the appropriate set of network-coded nodes according to the instantaneous link conditions. We also discuss the practical factors which can additionally affect the best scheduling strategy for wireless network coding.