  For several years, the completion time and decoding delay problems in
Instantly Decodable Network Coding (IDNC) were considered separately and were
thought to completely act against each other. Recently, some works aimed to
balance the effects of these two important IDNC metrics but none of them
studied a further optimization of one by controlling the other. In this paper,
we study the effect of controlling the decoding delay to reduce the completion
time below its currently best known solution. We first derive the
decoding-delay-dependent expressions of the users' and overall completion
times. Although using such expressions to find the optimal overall completion
time is NP-hard, we design a novel heuristic that minimizes the probability of
increasing the maximum of these decoding-delay-dependent completion time
expressions after each transmission through a layered control of their decoding
delays. Simulation results show that this new algorithm achieves both a lower
mean completion time and mean decoding delay compared to the best known
heuristic for completion time reduction. The gap in performance becomes
significant for harsh erasure scenarios.
