On the application of network coding with diversity to opportunistic scheduling

In this correspondence, we study the application of network coding to opportunistic scheduling for wireless uplink channels. An important observation is that existing scheduling protocols occasionally have to allow the users which do not have the largest channel gain to be scheduled, which can maintain the fairness but reduce the throughput. The key idea proposed in this paper is to always schedule the user with best channel gain for transmission, and meantime the use of network coding encourages the scheduled users to help the ones which have not been served previously. Analytical and numerical results have been developed to show that the proposed network coding schedulers can achieve better tradeoff of fairness and system throughput than comparable schemes.