Minimizing the completion time of a wireless cooperative network using network coding

We consider the performance of network coding for a wireless cooperative network in which a source wants to transmit M data packets to two receivers. We assume that receivers can share their received packets with each other or simply wait to receive the packets from the source. The problem of finding an optimum packet transmission policy that minimizes the completion time in such a network is solved by modeling the problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). Our analysis is useful for a series of network coding and forwarding schemes with or without feedback. Our results show that the optimal network coding solution in terms of completion time, outperforms broadcasting with network coding by a factor of 2.13 and outperforms forwarding mechanisms by a factor of 6.1. Beyond computing the optimal completion time, we identify the critical decision policies derived from the MDP solution.