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 re-transmissions for heavy traffic, the delay incurred by the use of random linear codes is significantly higher when the source is lightly loaded