Trade-off between Redundancy and Feedback in Wireless Network Communication

Feedback is an important control mechanism that provides reliability in most wireless network protocols. However, feedback incurs some overhead, especially in lossy network environments. Many previous works on reliable communication neglect the cost of the feedback messages. In this paper, we study the problem of minimum-cost reliable transmission over error-prone wireless networks by considering the cost of feedback. We address two cases: the case where we have a finite number of packets to send and the case where we have infinite packets. In both cases, we provide a solution to the problem with one-hop broadcast transmission. After that, we study the case where network coding is used in our proposed methods. In addition to that, we extend our approaches to address the problem of minimum-cost reliable broadcasting in multi-hop wireless networks. Our simulation results show that the cost of our proposed method is about 40% less than that of the traditional Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) method. Also, the cost of our proposed method with network coding is about 40% less than that of the traditional ARQ method with network coding. We also show that, in the case with small batches of packets, our proposed methods are more efficient than the LT code, which is a rateless code.