Wireless network coding with partial overhearing information

We study an 1-hop broadcast channel with two receivers. Due to overhearing channels, the receivers have side information which can be leveraged by interflow network coding techniques to provide throughput increase. In this setup, we consider two different control mechanisms, the deterministic system, where the contents of the receivers' buffers are announced to the coding node via overhearing reports and the stochastic system, where the coding node makes stochastic control decisions based on statistics and the performance is improved via NACK messages. We study the minimal evacuation times for the two systems and obtain analytical expressions of the throughput region for the deterministic and the code-constrained region for the stochastic. We show that maximum performance is achieved by simple XOR policies. For equal transmission rates r1 = r2, the two regions are equal. If r1 ≠ r2, we showcase the tradeoff between throughput and overhead. © 2013 IEEE