On the delay and energy performance in coded two-hop line networks with bursty erasures

We consider two-hop line networks where the communication links are bursty packet erasure channels modeled as a simple two-state Gilbert-Elliott channel. The first and second node in the line have local information with Poisson-distributed arrivals available and intend to communicate this information to the receiving node in the line. We consider an online approach and random linear network coding for erasure correction. We provide a queueing-theoretic analysis of two different models, a genie aided full duplex model and a partially genie aided half-duplex model, where the genie only provides the channel state information. Channel-aware policies are shown to reduce delay by up to a factor of 3 in our examples and significantly increase the network's stable throughput region compared to a simple queue-length driven policy.