On the queueing delay of a multicast erasure channel

In this work we address the stability and delay performance of a multicast erasure channel with random arrivals at the source node. We consider both a standard retransmission (ARQ) scheme as well as random linear coding. Our results show that while random linear coding may outperform retransmissions for heavy traffic, the delay incurred by the use of random linear codes is significantly higher when the source is lightly loaded.