Max-Degree Network Coding for Wireless data BroadCasting

Wireless broadcasting systems employ multiple retransmissions to guarantee the correct reception of each packet. Traditional hybrid automatic retransmission request (HARQ) protocol retransmits one packet per slot. Hence, a large amount of retransmissions are required to correctly receive all the packets, which lead to low spectrum efficiency. In this paper, we propose a Max-Degree Network Coding (MDNC) based Wireless BroadCasting (WBC) protocol. Specifically, to reduce the overall number of retransmissions, lost packets of different user equipments (UEs) are network coding (NC) combined at the access node (AN) by utilizing MDNC strategy. At each UE, the lost packet can be recovered by using the proposed joint network recursive systematic convolution (RSC) decoder (JNRD). Theoretical analyses and simulation results show that the average number of transmissions performance of the proposed MDNC based WBC protocol outperforms that of the traditional index NC based WBC protocol.