Network coding based multicast retransmission for mobile communication networks

This paper proposes a network coding based retransmission scheme for supporting multicast in mobile communication networks. The proposed retransmission scheme introduces deterministic network coding to improve retransmission efficiency and retransmission reliability. A couple of efficient packet selection algorithms are proposed to select packets in performing network coding for retransmission. One is called Most-Least selection and the other is called Hamming distance based (Hamming-D) selection. Most-Least selects the two packets with the most retransmission requests and the least retransmission requests, while Hamming-D selects the two packets with the largest Hamming distance. Simulation results show that with Most-Least and Hamming-D the proposed retransmission scheme can achieve better retransmission performance in terms of retransmission efficiency and retransmission reliability than an existing retransmission scheme called Random Pick.