Speeding Multicast by Acknowledgment Reduction Technique (SMART) Enabling Robustness of QoE to the Number of Users

Abstract

We introduce a novel feedback protocol, called SMART, for wireless broadcast networks that use linear network coding. We consider transmission of packets from a single source to many receivers over a single-hop broadcast erasure channel with heterogeneous links. We propose a predictive model to minimize feedback as well as extraneous data transmissions by the source. In addition, we use the method of types to provide a lower bound for the expected total transmission time, and use simulations to show that our protocol operates close to this lower bound. We show that with SMART, counter to conventional wisdom, the average user's QoE improves slightly as the number of users increases. We demonstrate that SMART's algorithmic simplicity enables multicast transmissions that on average take fewer than 2 feedback rounds to complete. We show the favorable scalability of our technique with the number of users, which enables reliable quality of experience. We also show the robustness of this scheme to uncertainty in the number of receiving nodes, and packet erasure probability, as well as to partial loss of the feedback. Furthermore, we show that SMART performs nearly as well as an omniscient transmitter that requires no feedback.