A distributed opportunistic scheduling scheme for wireless network coding

Network coding (NC) is an emerging technology area promising to increase the utilization of both wired and wireless networks. It can be seen as an extension to routing by allowing relay nodes to combine the information received from multiple links in the subsequent transmissions. NC was initially proposed in the context of multicast in wired networks where it was proven to achieve the maximum multicast capacity. However, the operation of NC in wireless networks with multiple unicast transmissions and its impact on the different layers has not been fully understood. In this paper we give a thorough insight into the interaction of NC and scheduling in wireless networks and we propose a novel distributed proportional fair (PF) scheduling algorithm that exploits multiuser diversity and coding opportunities to maximize the network throughput while guarantees ldquoproportional fairnessrdquo.