On Network Coding for Stable Multicast Communication

We address the problem of transmitting packets to multiple receiver nodes over single-hop channels with probabilistic reception. The objective is to evaluate the stability properties of different transmission policies with and without network coding. We consider a dynamic network coding scheme based on the instantaneous queue content and we show that network coding increases the stable throughput and reduces the transmission energy costs (at the expense of additional processing energy costs). The comparison of (deterministic and random) linear network coding schemes with plain retransmission policies opens up several new questions regarding the tradeoffs of stable throughput, energy efficiency, packet overhead and complexity.