Challenging issues in multimedia transmission over wireless networks based on network coding

To meet increasing throughput, delay and reliability demands, future wireless networks will have to rely on increased cooperation both among nodes and among protocol layers in a node. This requires a wide variety of knowledge, from theoretical issues such as graph theory or information theory, to issues at the physical and network layers. A potential solution is the recently proposed network coding because it offers a number of desired properties such as resource efficiency, robustness and security. This paper focuses on two research directions for multimedia transmission over wireless networks based on network coding: (i) source-aware network coding and (ii) physical-layer network coding. These directions follow the cross-layer framework in designing the communication protocol stack. Challenging issues which are related to the practical design of network-coding enabled wireless networks are addressed and discussed.