CoRET: A Network Coding Based Multicast Retransmission Scheme for Mobile Communication Networks

This paper proposes a network Coding based RETransmission (CoRET) scheme for supporting multicast service in mobile communication networks. CoRET introduces network coding and employs a Hamming distance based packet selection algorithm to select packets for encoding in order to improve the retransmission performance in terms of efficiency and reliability. Simulation results show that CoRET can achieve better retransmission performance than an existing retransmission scheme, Random Pick. Moreover, a mathematical model is developed to analyze the impact of the number of original packets encoded into a packet for retransmission (i.e., encoding number) on the retransmission performance in order to find an optimal encoding number that can achieve the best performance. Numerical results show that for a reliable transmission channel a smaller encoding number can achieve a better performance while for an unreliable channel a larger encoding number is preferred.