The maximum stable broadcast throughput for wireless line networks with network coding and topology control

Abstract

We consider broadcasting from a single source to multiple destinations in a linear wireless erasure network with feedback. The problem is to find the maximum stable throughput under different transmission policies with opportunistic network coding and forwarding. Given stochastically varying traffic, we assume that network coding decisions are based on the availability of queued packets. The network is clustered into groups of terminals and network coding is applied locally to packets within each group. This allows us to evaluate the effects of topology control on the maximum stable rate. For each transmission policy we derive the optimal cluster size. We show that network coding improves the stable rate over plain retransmissions, and the network coding gain significantly benefits from opportunistic network coding, forwarding and topology control, ranging from 33% to 410%, depending on the physical channel parameters in the numerical experiments.