Network Coding Opportunity Analysis of COPE in Multihop Wireless Networks

A new packet-forwarding architecture, COPE [1], was proposed recently to demonstrate that by properly exploiting the network coding and physical-layer broadcast properties, the throughput of multihop wireless networks may be significantly improved. However, the theoretical framework is not available yet for a rigorous throughput study of COPE. As the first step toward this direction, in this paper we conduct an analytical analysis on coding opportunities that COPE can create in a multihop wireless network. For a given node, we first derive the probability density function (pdf) of overhearing probability between its two neighbor nodes. Then, based on the pdf of overhearing probability we further analyze the probability of encoding multiple packets together at the node. This work not only provides a framework for the node-level performance analysis of COPE but also lays a foundation for the further network-level performance analysis of COPE.