Delay Reduction for Instantly Decodable Network Coding in Persistent Channels With Feedback Imperfections

This paper considers the multicast decoding delay reduction problem for generalized instantly decodable network coding (G-IDNC) over persistent erasure channels with feedback imperfections. The feedback scenario discussed is the most general situation in which the sender does not always receive acknowledgments from the receivers after each transmission and the feedback communications are subject to loss. The decoding delay increment expressions are derived and employed to express the decoding delay reduction problem as a maximum weight clique problem in the G-IDNC graph. This paper provides a theoretical analysis of the expected decoding delay increase at each time instant. Problem formulations in simpler channel and feedback models are shown to be special cases of the proposed generalized formulation. Since finding the optimal solution to the problem is known to be NP-hard, a suboptimal greedy algorithm is designed and compared with blind approaches proposed in the literature. Through extensive simulations, the proposed algorithm is shown to outperform the blind methods in all situations and to achieve significant improvement, particularly for high time-correlated channels.