Optimal reverse carpooling over wireless networks - a distributed optimization approach

We focus on a particular form of network coding, reverse carpooling, in a wireless network where the potentially coded transmitted messages are to be decoded immediately upon reception. The network is fixed and known, and the system performance is measured in terms of the number of wireless broadcasts required to meet multiple unicast demands. Motivated by the structure of the coding scheme, we formulate the problem as a linear program by introducing a flow variable for each triple of connected nodes. This allows us to have a formulation polynomial in the number of nodes. Using dual decomposition and projected subgradient method, we present a decentralized algorithm to obtain optimal routing schemes in presence of coding opportunities. We show that the primal sub-problem can be expressed as a shortest path problem on an edge-graph, and the proposed algorithm requires each node to exchange information only with its neighbors.