Delay-Energy lower bound on Two-Way Relay Wireless Network Coding

Network coding is a novel solution that significantly improve the throughput and energy consumed of wireless networks by mixing traffic flows through algebraic operations. In conventional network coding scheme, a packet has to wait for packets from other sources to be coded before transmitting. The wait-and-code scheme will naturally result in packet loss rate in a finite buffer. We will propose Enhanced Network Coding (ENC), an extension to ONC in continuous time domain. In ENC, the relay transmits both coded and uncoded packets to reduce delay. In exchange, more energy is consumed in transmitting uncoded packets. ENC is a practical algorithm to achieve minimal average delay and zero packet-loss rate under given energy constraint. The system model for ENC on a general renewal process queuing is presented. In particular, we will show that there exists a fundamental trade-off between average delay and energy. We will also present the analytic result of lower bound for this trade-off curve, which can be achieved by ENC.