Reliable Broadcast with Joint Forward Error Correction and Erasure Codes in Wireless Communication Networks

One of the main challenges in wireless networks is addressing the unreliability of the wireless links, and providing reliable transmissions. Two important sources of errors in wireless transmissions are noise and interference. In order to address the errors due to noise, forward error correction methods can be used, in which redundancy is added to the packets to detect and correct the bit errors. However, when the environment is too noisy, or there is interference among the transmissions, the forward error correction codes might not be able to correct the bit errors, resulting in packet erasures. In this case, application layer erasure codes, such as network coding, are useful. In this paper, we consider a wireless network which faces both random bit errors and packet erasures. In order to provide reliable transmissions, we benefit from joint forward error correction and erasure codes, and formulate the successful transmission probability. We also propose a low-complexity method to find the optimal redundancy that should be assign to the forward error correction and erasure code. Our method consists of two phases: offline and online phases. In the offline phase, we generate a reference table, which shows the successful delivery of the packets for each possible transmission strategy. The source node uses this reference table in the second phase to find the optimal strategy depending on the noise and interference level. We show the effectiveness of our proposed method through extensive simulations.