Rate aware network codes for coordinated multi base-station networks

In this paper, we address the problem of reducing the completion time of a radio access network to deliver a frame of messages using Rate Aware Instantly Decodable Network Coding (RA-IDNC). While previous works only considered a single base-station setting, this paper extends the results to a more modern paradigm of networks with multiple coordinated base-stations. The different rates of the base-stations to the various users will be thus incorporated in the network coding decisions, so as to schedule the coded messages and transmission rates jointly in order to reduce the overall completion time. Given the notorious intractability of the completion time reduction problem, the paper uses an online relaxation using an anticipated version of the completion time. This problem is then solved by showing that it is equivalent to a maximum weight independent set problem on a newly designed graph. An efficient multi-layer heuristic is further developed to address this problem in polynomial time. Simulation results suggest that the proposed solution outperforms the uncoded schemes.