Wireless Broadcast Using Network Coding

TLDR

Reliable transmission over error‑prone networks typically uses forward error correction or retransmission techniques. The paper proposes network coding schemes to reduce broadcast transmissions from a single sender to multiple receivers. The authors combine and retransmit lost packets so that one transmission enables multiple receivers to recover their losses, and they derive theoretical bandwidth‑efficiency results versus ARQ. Simulations and theory show the proposed network coding schemes outperform ARQ.

Abstract

Traditional approaches to reliably transmit information over an error-prone network employ either forward error correction (FEC) or retransmission techniques. In this paper, we propose some network coding schemes to reduce the number of broadcast transmissions from one sender to multiple receivers. The main idea is to allow the sender to combine and retransmit the lost packets in a certain way so that with one transmission, multiple receivers are able to recover their own lost packets. For comparison, we derive a few theoretical results on the bandwidth efficiency of the proposed network coding and traditional automatic repeat-request (ARQ) schemes. Both simulations and theoretical analysis confirm the advantages of the proposed network coding schemes over the ARQ ones.