Efficient Network Coding for Wireless Broadcasting

It has been shown in the literature that network coding can improve the transmission efficiency of wireless broadcasting as compared to traditional ARQ schemes. In this paper, we propose an improved network coding scheme that can asymptotically achieve the theoretical lower bound on transmission overhead for a sufficiently large number of information blocks. The proposed scheme makes use of an index allocation algorithm that distributes information blocks that have been erased during transmission into a minimum number of encoding sets, where each set represents the erased blocks to be jointly network encoded and retransmitted. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme enables higher transmission efficiencies than traditional ARQ, and previously proposed networks coding schemes for wireless broadcasting.