The Impact of Network Coding Cluster Size on Approximate Decoding Performance

In this paper, delay-constrained data transmission is considered over error-prone networks. Network coding is deployed for efficient information exchange, and an approximate decoding approach is deployed to overcome potential all-or-nothing problems. Our focus is on determining the cluster size and its impact on approximate decoding performance. Decoding performance is quantified, and we show that performance is determined only by the number of packets. Moreover, the fundamental tradeoff between approximate decoding performance and data transfer rate improvement is analyzed; as the cluster size increases, the data transfer rate improves and decoding performance is degraded. This tradeoff can lead to an optimal cluster size of network coding-based networks that achieves the target decoding performance of applications. A set of experiment results confirms the analysis.