Delay reduction in lossy intermittent feedback for generalized instantly decodable network coding

In this paper, we study the effect of lossy intermittent feedback loss events on the multicast decoding delay performance of generalized instantly decodable network coding. These feedback loss events create uncertainty at the sender about the reception statues of different receivers and thus uncertainty to accurately determine subsequent instantly decodable coded packets. To solve this problem, we first identify the different possibilities of uncertain packets at the sender and their probabilities. We then derive the expression of the mean decoding delay. We formulate the Generalized Instantly Decodable Network Coding (G-IDNC) minimum decoding delay problem as a maximum weight clique problem. Since finding the optimal solution is NP-hard, we design a variant of the algorithm employed in [1]. Our algorithm is compared to the two blind graph update proposed in [2] through extensive simulations. Results show that our algorithm outperforms the blind approaches in all the situations and achieves a tolerable degradation, against the perfect feedback, for large feedback loss period.