A simple coded ARQ for satellite broadcasting

We introduce a novel packet retransmission technique which improves the efficiency of automatic retransmission query (ARQ) protocols in the context of satellite broadcast/multicast systems. The proposed coded ARQ technique, similarly to fountain coding, performs transmission of redundant packets, which are made by linear combinations of the packets composing the source block. Differently from fountain codes, the packets for the linear combinations are selected on the basis of the retransmission requests coming from the user terminals. The selection is performed in a way that, at the terminals, the source packets can be recovered iteratively by means of simple back-substitutions. This work aims at providing a simple and efficient alternative to reliable multicast protocols based on erasure correction coding techniques.