A new ARQ-scheme for multicast satellite communication

More and more satellite networks with a huge number of stations are built up. Because of the broadcast capability these networks are predestined for multicast applications. Many of them require an error free transmission of data which cannot be guaranteed by using only a forward error correction technique. Therefore, automatic repeat request schemes must be applied which retransmit erroneously received data. The most efficient technique is selective repeat: besides the case of a buffer overflow at the receiver´s site only erroneous frames are retransmitted. So each incorrect received frame must be repeated (separately) in multicast environments. The authors propose a new scheme which is especially designed for a point-to-multipoint scenario. In their `XOR-protocol´ one retransmission corrects several erroneously transmitted frames at once