Erasure coding for reliable adaptive retransmission in wireless broadcast/multicast systems

In this paper, we present new adaptive automatic repeat request (ARQ) schemes for wireless broadcast/multicast combining erasure coding (EC) and packet retransmission. Traditional approaches rely on retransmitting the lost packets in a point-to-point or point-to-multipoint mode. The main idea behind the presented protocols is to retransmit adaptive combinations of the lost packets using EC, which can help several receivers to recover the lost information with fewer retransmission attempts. We propose two versions of EC-based ARQ protocols, and investigate theoretically the corresponding transmission bandwidths in different contexts. We show through simulation results the efficiency of the proposed protocols with respect to conventional ARQ strategies and new published ARQ works for broadcast/multicast. Finally, a new sliding window NACK feedback policy is presented for the case of a high number of receivers to avoid the feedback implosion problem.