  Consider a radio access network wherein a base-station is required to deliver
a set of order-constrained messages to a set of users over independent erasure
channels. This paper studies the delivery time reduction problem using
instantly decodable network coding (IDNC). Motivated by time-critical and
order-constrained applications, the delivery time is defined, at each
transmission, as the number of undelivered messages. The delivery time
minimization problem being computationally intractable, most of the existing
literature on IDNC propose sub-optimal online solutions. This paper suggests a
novel method for solving the problem by introducing the delivery delay as a
measure of distance to optimality. An expression characterizing the delivery
time using the delivery delay is derived, allowing the approximation of the
delivery time minimization problem by an optimization problem involving the
delivery delay. The problem is, then, formulated as a maximum weight clique
selection problem over the IDNC graph wherein the weight of each vertex
reflects its corresponding user and message's delay. Simulation results suggest
that the proposed solution achieves lower delivery and completion times as
compared to the best-known heuristics for delivery time reduction.
