  This study explores the throughput and delay that can be achieved by various
forwarding schemes employing multiple paths and different degrees of redundancy
focusing on linear network coding. The key contribution of the study is an
analytical framework for modeling the throughput and delay for various schemes
considering wireless mesh networks where, unicast traffic is forwarded and
hop-by-hop retransmissions are employed for achieving reliability. The
analytical framework is generalized for an arbitrary number of paths and hops
per path. Another key contribution of the study is the evaluation and extension
of the numerical results drawn from the analysis through NS-2 simulations. Our
results show that in scenarios with significant interference the best
throughput-delay tradeoff is achieved by single path forwarding. Moreover, when
significant interference is present and network coding employs the larger
packet generation size it experiences higher delay than all other schemes due
to the inter-arrival times aggregating over all coded packets required to
decode a packet generation.
