We focus on a particular form of network coding, reverse carpooling, in a
wireless network where the potentially coded transmitted messages are to be
decoded immediately upon reception. The network is fixed and known, and the
system performance is measured in terms of the number of wireless broadcasts
required to meet multiple unicast demands. Motivated by the structure of the
coding scheme, we formulate the problem as a linear program by introducing a
flow variable for each triple of connected nodes. This allows us to have a
formulation polynomial in the number of nodes. Using dual decomposition and
projected subgradient method, we present a decentralized algorithm to obtain
optimal routing schemes in presence of coding opportunities. We show that the
primal sub-problem can be expressed as a shortest path problem on an
\emph{edge-graph}, and the proposed algorithm requires each node to exchange
information only with its neighbors.Comment: submitted to CISS 201