Efficient Loss Recovery Using Network Coding in Vehicular Safety Communication

Before vehicle-to-vehicle-communication-based road safety becomes a reality, one of the challenges that needs to be resolved is efficient and timely recovery of safety packets that may be lost due to reception failure. Various types of retransmission-based recovery protocols have been proposed in the literature to address this problem. Although, retransmission can help recover some of the lost packets, it consumes significant bandwidth. In this paper, we apply the concept of network coding to achieve efficient loss recovery by combining multiple packets that were transmitted by different vehicles into a single retransmission. Through an analytical study of coding gain, we show how to optimize the performance of our proposed network coding based recovery scheme. Using simulation, we demonstrate that the use of network coding improves the bandwidth efficiency of the recovery protocols, which in turn improves the performance of vehicular safety communication.