Rate-Aware Instantly Decodable Network Codes for Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

Rate-Aware Instantly Decodable Network Coding (RA-IDNC) was suggested to improve the throughput of future cellular networks. In this work, we propose to improve the traditional RA- IDNC by taking advantage of the heterogeneity in cellular networks. We formulate the completion time minimization problem in heterogeneous wireless networks as an optimization problem over an RA-IDNC graph, and prove it is NP-hard. In addition, we propose a heuristic that iteratively minimizes completion time taking into account the users' download rates. Simulations show a reduction of around 31% in average completion time when utilizing our proposed scheme as compared to traditional RA-IDNC.