  Real-time applications require latencies on the order of a millisecond with
very high reliabilities, paralleling the requirements for high-performance
industrial control. Current wireless technologies like WiFi, Bluetooth, LTE,
etc. are unable to meet these stringent latency and reliability requirements,
forcing the use of wired systems. This paper introduces a wireless
communication protocol based on network coding that in conjunction with
cooperative communication techniques builds the necessary diversity to achieve
the target reliability. The proposed protocol is analyzed using a communication
theoretic delay-limited-capacity framework and compared to proposed protocols
without network coding. The results show that for larger network sizes or
payloads employing network coding lowers the minimum SNR required to achieve
the target reliability. For a scenario inspired by an industrial printing
application with $30$ nodes in the control loop, aggregate throughput of $4.8$
Mb/s, $20$MHz of bandwidth and cycle time under $2$ ms, the protocol can
robustly achieve a system probability of error better than $10^{-9}$ with a
nominal SNR less than $2$ dB under ideal channel conditions.
