Iterative merging algorithm for cooperative data exchange

We consider the problem of finding the minimum sum-rate strategy in cooperative data exchange systems that do not allow packet-splitting (NPS-CDE). In an NPS-CDE system, there are a number of geographically close cooperative clients who send packets to help the others recover a packet set. A minimum sum-rate strategy is the strategy that achieves universal recovery (the situation when all the clients recover the whole packet set) with the the minimal sum-rate (the total number of transmissions). We propose an iterative merging (IM) algorithm that recursively merges client sets based on a lower estimate of the minimum sum-rate and updates to the value of the minimum sum-rate. We also show that a minimum sum-rate strategy can be learned by allocating rates for the local recovery in each merged client set in the IM algorithm. We run an experiment to show that the complexity of the IM algorithm is lower than that of the existing deterministic algorithm when the number of clients is lower than 94.