On the Minimum Number of Transmissions in Single-Hop Wireless Coding Networks

The advent of network coding presents promising opportunities in many areas of communication and networking. It has been recently shown that network coding technique can significantly increase the overall throughput of wireless networks by taking advantage of their broadcast nature. In wireless networks, each transmitted packet is broadcasted within a certain area and can be overheard by the neighboring nodes. When a node needs to transmit packets, it employs the opportunistic coding approach that uses the knowledge of what the node's neighbors have heard in order to reduce the number of transmissions.