Block Size Estimation for Time-Sensitive Applications under Wireless Network Coding

Network coding has been designed for wireless networks to improve the capabilities of throughput, reliability, and routing by mixing information from different flows and conveying more information in each transmission. If packets are coded by blocks with large sizes, time-sensitive applications in wireless network will suffer from high delay between blocks caused by intra-session coding scheme. In this paper, a block delay model in coding scheme is derived, and then four delay estimation algorithms are introduced which are used for choosing a proper block size to satisfy the need of time-sensitive applications. The algorithm performs with low complexity and precision controllable.