Reliable network coding for minimizing decoding delay and feedback overhead in wireless broadcasting

Network coding techniques have absorbed much attention for providing reliable broadcasting services in wireless networks. However, the intrinsic tradeoff among throughput, decoding delay, and feedback overhead has obstructed the application of the previously proposed schemes in practice. In this paper, we firstly propose a rate-controlled network coding scheme (RANC), which can effectively reduce the decoding delay of the receiver suffering from a poor channel condition, without compromising the system throughput. Based on RANC, we further propose a moving window network coding scheme together with an early loss alarm mechanism (MWNC-ELA), which achieves similar decoding delay performance to RANC, but greatly simplifies its feedback mechanism. As a benchmark of MWNC-ELA, we analyze the decoding delay performance of RANC using the random walk theory. Simulation results show that the proposed schemes outperform the existing solutions in terms of throughput, decoding delay, and feedback overhead.