## 1 Introduction  
In recent years, with the rapid development of wireless networks technologies, wireless multimedia applications have become widely used in daily life. The quality of service (QoS) demand of real-time applications challenges the design of a wireless network. Jitter is a key parameter to characterize the QoS in a wireless network. First proposed by [PERSON] _et al._[1], network coding is an effective solution for a wireless network because it can provide the performance improvement in throughput. [PERSON] _et al._[2] and [PERSON] _et al._[3] provide the upper bounds of the throughput gain achieved by network coding. Network coding is also applied to Computer-and-Forward networks [4]. In this paper, we consider the simple one-hop XOR coding as in [5]. Exploiting the broadcasting nature of the physical layer, network coding can deliver multiple packets in a single transmission, thus the congestion is alleviated, which yields lower packet delay and jitter. For example, consider a three-node chain topology case as shown in Figure 1. Here node S1 and node S2 want to exchange a pair of packets \(a\) and \(b\) via node \(R\) which acts as a relay node. In the conventional store-and-forward approach, node S1 sends its packet \(a\) to node \(R\), and then it is forwarded to node S2. Similarly, node S2 sends packet \(b\) to node S1 in two transmissions. However, in the network coding approach, when the two packets \(a\) and \(b\) are received at node \(R\), they are combined by a bit-wise XOR operation, and then encoded packet _a_\(\oplus\)_b_ is broadcast to nodes S1 and S2 simultaneously. Because node S1 (resp. S2 ) has packet \(a\) (resp. \(b\) ), node S1 (resp. S2 ) can get its required packet by XORing the encoded packet _a_\(\oplus\)_b_ and packet \(a\) (resp. \(b\) ). Note that, in this case, a total of three transmissions are required instead of four transmissions in the conventional store-and-forward approach. The first practical unicast routing with network coding, named as COPE, was proposed in [5]. However, COPE treats routing discovery and coding opportunity detection separately. Nodes on path passively detect coding opportunities existing among the received packets. Therefore, routing coupling with potential coding opportunity detection was proposed, which it is referred to as coding-aware routing [6]. To illustrate it clearly, an example is given in Figure 2 where there exist two flows to be routed. Using the shortest path routing without coding opportunity detection, the disjoint paths shown in Figure 2a are very likely to be chosen. On the other hand, if we use a coding-aware routing, as shown in Figure 2b, two flows 1\(\rightarrow\)2\(\rightarrow\)4 and 4\(\rightarrow\)2\(\rightarrow\)3 intersect at node 2 which has the opportunity to perform network coding. Figure 1: A three-node chain topology of network coding. However, existing coding-aware routing protocols such as ROCX [6], RCR [7], DCAR [8], PNCAR [9], CPTT [10], TCAR [11], NCQR [12], and LCMR [13] focused on the novel routing metric design that captures the characteristics of network coding. In the packet coding algorithm, they use ONC scheme [5] in selected coding node. When the wireless channel is available, the node takes the head packet in its coding queue, and it also checks which other packets in the coding queue may be encoded with this head packet, does XOR operation for those packets, and broadcasts the XORed packet to its neighboring nodes. If there exist no coding opportunities, our node does not wait for the arrival of a future coding opportunity and will only store and forward the head packet according to the established route table. However, the ONC scheme does not consider the queue state and never delay packets to wait for the arrival of a future coding opportunity. Because of the stochastic nature of the packet arrival process of various flows, this may result in the loss of some potential coding opportunities and the contribution of network coding to delay and jitter performance is low.