Opportunistic and Fairness Scheduling Mechanism for Wireless Network Coding

Network coding can greatly improve the throughput and power efficiency of wireless networks by mixing packets from different flows into a single one before forwarding. However, packets need to wait for its correspondences before coding, which may induce additional delay and packet loss. Considering the diversity of traffic flows and the stochastic nature of the packet arrival process in wireless networks, we propose an Opportunistic and Fairness Scheduling (OFS) mechanism for wireless network coding. The relay node can transmit either network-coded or un-coded packets. Traffic arrival rate and queue state are the two most important facts that determine a packet´s transmission with or without network coding. Finally, we discuss the impact of different parameters on the performance of OFS through simulations and show the effectiveness and fairness of the proposed method.