Efficient multicast in wireless networks using Network Coding

Recently, it has been proven that retransmission based on Network Coding (NC) can greatly improve the performance of wireless networks with broadcast erasure channels. However, network coding also introduces additional delay at the both sending and receiving sides, resulting in the decline of the Quality of user Experience (QoE). In this paper, we consider the users´ waiting time and the decoding delay as the performance metrics and then propose MixCode, a NC-based loss recovery method, to improve the delay performance in heterogeneous wireless networks. MixCode incorporates Opportunistic Network Coding (ONC) with Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC), where a NC packet can be decoded by simply XORing operation at some destinations, but by Gaussian elimination at other destinations. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm can efficiently reduce both the waiting time and the decoding delay in comparison with the existing NC-based schemes.