On the benefits of network coding for wireless applications

We argue that the main benefits of network coding in a wireless environment might manifest in situations where the topology dynamically changes, and operation is restricted to distributed algorithms that do not employ knowledge about the network environment. We consider several problem instances in this set-up, that include broadcasting information to all nodes of the network and collecting sensor measurements. We show that in many such cases, under some simplifying assumptions, the problem is theoretically equivalent to simple variations of the coupon collector problem. Thus network coding can offer benefits of a factor of log n, where n is the number of nodes and the benefits are in terms of energy efficiency, as was proven in [3]. We present simulation results under more realistic conditions that support this claim.