Decoding and File Transfer Delay Balancing in Network Coding Broadcast

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how to optimize network coding parameters to balance decoding delay and transmission efficiency in wireless broadcast of large files to multiple users.

Contribution

It introduces a method to determine the minimum coding window size ensuring file delivery within a specified delay constraint in RLNC-based broadcast.

Findings

Derived the minimum coding window size for delay-bounded transmission

Provided a theoretical framework for delay and throughput trade-offs

Validated the approach with simulation results

Abstract

Network Coding is a packet encoding technique which has recently been shown to improve network performance (by reducing delays and increasing throughput) in broadcast and multicast communications. The cost for such an improvement comes in the form of increased decoding complexity (and thus delay) at the receivers end. Before delivering the file to higher layers, the receiver should first decode those packets. In our work we consider the broadcast transmission of a large file to N wireless users. The file is segmented into a number of blocks (each containing K packets - the Coding Window Size). The packets of each block are encoded using Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC).We obtain the minimum coding window size so that the completion time of the file transmission is upper bounded by a used defined delay constraint.