Design of Network Coding for Wireless Broadcast and Multicast With Optimal Decoders

• Published in: IEEE transactions on wireless communications Vol. 17; no. 10; pp. 6944 - 6957
• Main Authors: Yue, Guosen, Yang, Kai, Zhao, Shengjie, Poor, H. Vincent
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.10.2018; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Block codes; Broadcasting; Coding; Computer simulation; Decoders; Decoding; erasure codes; Graph representations; Graphical representations; Greedy algorithms; maximum likelihood decoding; Multicast; multicast broadcast service; Network coding; Packet transmission; Receivers; Scheduling; short block code design; Simulated annealing; Wireless communication; Wireless networks
• ISSN: 1536-1276; 1558-2248
• DOI: 10.1109/TWC.2018.2864996

This paper considers the design of network coding schemes for reliable wireless broadcast and multicast transmissions, in which the same packet is broadcast to a group of receivers. Network coding across multiple broadcasted packets is employed to generate redundant packets for the broadcast retransmissions so that the lost packets can be recovered. It is assumed that optimal decoders are employed at the receivers and the focus is on the design of short block codes with small numbers of redundant bits. To this end, use if first made of the residual graph representation to calculate the error probability of the optimal decoder. Then two code design schemes are proposed to minimize the error probability, including a low-complexity deterministic greedy code design algorithm as well as a stochastic code construction algorithm inspired by the simulated annealing technique. Extensive simulation studies have been carried out to assess the performance of the proposed schemes. It is seen that for a given number of retransmissions, the proposed network coding schemes can considerably increase the average number of recovered packages per user at the receivers and thereby improve the spectral efficiency over traditional coding methods.