Deadline-aware broadcasting in wireless networks with local network coding

Energy limitation is one of the most important challenges in wireless networks. Reducing the number of transmissions is one of the most effective ways to reduce the energy consumption. For this purpose, network coding can be used to mix packets together to reduce the number of transmissions. In addition to the importance of energy efficiency, in many applications, delay and deadline constraints are also important metrics. On the other hand, in order to increase the coding opportunity and efficiency of network coding, relay nodes need to wait to receive more packets, which increases the delay of the packets. In this paper, we study the problem of using network coding in wireless networks with deadline constraints. We provide three heuristics in an all-to-all broadcast application, to compute the local waiting time of the packets at relay nodes to improve the efficiency of the network coding without missing deadlines. Our simulation results show that our techniques reduce the number of transmissions while allowing all of the nodes to receive the packets on-time.