Dynamic Index Coding for Wireless Broadcast Networks

Abstract: We consider a wireless broadcast station that transmits packets to multiple users. The packet requests for each user may overlap, and some users may already have certain packets. This presents a problem of broadcasting in the presence of side information, and is a generalization of the well known (and unsolved) index coding problem of information theory. Rather than achieving the full capacity region, we develop a code-constrained capacity region, which restricts attention to a pre-specified set of coding actions. We develop a dynamic max-weight algorithm that allows for random packet arrivals and supports any traffic inside the code-constrained capacity region. Further, we provide a simple set of codes based on cycles in the underlying demand graph. We show these codes are optimal for a class of broadcast relay problems.