Selective Network Coding for Reliable Wireless Broadcast

In this paper we propose an efficient Selective Network Coding (SNC) mechanism that improves the reliability of data delivery in a wireless broadcast scenario. The advantage of Network Coding (NC) in terms of reliable data delivery is gained with SNC while maintaining a limited amount of transmission and NC computational overhead. Unlike other practical NC approaches, SNC encoding is performed on lost packets only; sender packets are sent as plain packets (unencoded). SNC encoded packets contribute in the recovery of lost packets in at least one receiver in a broadcast scenario. The results of SNC performance evaluation in this paper show major improvements achieved compared to conventional retransmission.