Scaling Laws with Network Coding

This chapter provides an overview of the scaling law results associated with network coding as the network size and/or the coding window size scale. These results highlight the potential gains to be derived from network coding in various scenarios of interest. It covers the scaling of throughput and delay performance metrics for wireless networks both under time-varying channel conditions and node mobility. The fundamental strength of coding is its ability to spread information across long chunks of transmission signals to achieve robustness against statistical channel variations. While this idea has transformed the world by enabling a global communication network, most of the exciting advances have been limited to point-to-point links with a few other capacity results relating to limited multi-user scenarios. The interesting findings on the performance of network coding in unreliable wireless networks under several scaling regimes includes the network size, the coding window size, the number of flows in the network, and the application delay constraints. These results not only help quantify the performance of network coding for comparison to traditional scheduling and routing policies, but also identify cases in which significant throughput, delay, or economic gains are achievable even with simple randomized network coding strategies.