Delay optimal scheduling for network coding broadcast

We study the broadcast transmission of a single file to an arbitrary number of receivers in a wireless one-hop setting, using random linear network coding (RLNC). In contrast to similar studies, we apply RLNC within segments of the file. In a previous study, we showed that this method can achieve near optimal file transfer completion time while tackling the main drawbacks of RLNC; increased decoding delay and increased storage and complexity requirements at the receivers. Towards that end we developed and evaluated a packet scheduling policy, namely the Least Received (LR) batches policy. In our previous work, we proved the optimality of the LR policy, with regards to the completion time, in systems with two receivers. In this work we will show that the LR policy is optimal, in the same sense, regardless of the number of the receivers