Retransmission mechanism with probabilistic network coding in wireless networks

Abstract

In wireless networks, the retransmission should be performed by the sender to recover lost packets at the receiver. The conventional retransmission scheme only includes one lost packet in a retransmission, which results low retransmission efficiency. However, with the help of broadcasting nature of wireless channel and the network coding (NC) technique, we can encode N packets lost at N destinations in one retransmission to effectively recover the lost packets. Some work has been conducted on using NC to retransmit lost packets in the single-sender multiple-receiver (SSMR) wireless network scenarios. In this paper, we combine NC and retransmission in multiple-sender multiple-receiver scenarios, which is a more realistic wireless network scenario. To this end, a Probabilistic Network Coding Retransmission Mechanism (PNCRM) is proposed for MSMR wireless networks. The analysis and numerical results validate the effectiveness of PNCRM.