Network coding-aware multicast optimization in multi-hop wireless networks

Network coding is an elegant and novel technique to improve network throughput and performance in practical networking systems. The main challenge in exploiting the network coding is how coding opportunities can accurately be identified and utilized. In this paper, we discuss a coding-aware multicast in a multi-hop wireless network with a schedule-based MAC protocol. For a delay-sensitive application, we focus on how fast each destination node can receive the complete information, or equivalently, what the information rate arriving at each destination is. We formulate this problem via a cross-layer approach by taking consideration of resource scheduling and coding-aware multicast routing jointly.