Performance Trade-Offs in a Network Coding Router

The authors consider the problem of optimizing the performance of a network coding router with two stochastic flows. They develop a queuing model which accounts for the fact that coding is not performed when packets are transmitted, but is done by a separate program or hardware which operates independently of the hardware that sends packets out over links. They formulate and solve a constrained optimization problem which provides the optimal time that the router should wait before sending the information that it has uncoded, so that the average response time of the system is minimized.