Impact of network coding on system delay for multi-source multi-destination scenarios

Existing work has shown that random coding across multi-cast sessions can reduce the system delay significantly, however, such a scheme requires the strong assumption that each source has the priori information of other sources' messages. Actually the broadcasting nature of radio propagation can provide an opportunity to realize collaboration across sessions without causing much system overhead. In this paper, we propose the application of network coding to multi-source multi-destination (MSMD) scenarios and provide formal analysis for the improvement of system delay. In particular, two types of analytical results have been developed, one based on the outage probability and the other based on the use of practical convolutional codes. Monte-Carlo simulation results have also been provided to demonstrate the delay performance of the proposed network coded protocol.