Performance of Wireless Network Coding: Motivating Small Encoding Numbers

This paper focuses on a particular transmission scheme called local network coding, which has been reported to provide significant performance gains in practical wireless networks. The performance of this scheme strongly depends on the network topology and thus on the locations of the wireless nodes. Also, it has been shown previously that finding the encoding strategy, which achieves maximum performance, requires complex calculations to be undertaken by the wireless node in real-time. Both deterministic and random point pattern are explored and using the Boolean connectivity model the authors provide upper bounds for the maximum coding number, i.e., the number of packets that can be combined such that the corresponding receivers are able to decode.