Energy Efficient Opportunistic Network Coding for Wireless Networks

We consider energy efficient network coding design in wireless networks with multiple unicast sessions. Our approach decomposes multiple unicast sessions into a superposition of multicast and unicast sessions, with coding occurring only within each session. We give an optimization approach that is more general than the existing poison-remedy optimization formulation. For the case of wireless, we consider XOR coding and give an achievable rate region for a primary interference model. To simplify network operation, we give an oblivious backpressure algorithm which does not optimize overhearing of transmissions, and a practical protocol called COPR based on the oblivious backpressure algorithm. Simulation experiments show that COPR largely reduces network power consumption over existing algorithms.