Relay-Aided Broadcasting with Instantaneously Decodable Binary Network Codes

We consider a base-station broadcasting a set of order-insensitive packets to a user population over packet-erasure channels. To improve efficiency we propose a relay-aided transmission scheme using instantaneously-decodable binary network coding. Our proposed scheme ensures that a coded packet can be immediately decoded at the user side without delay. Moreover, only binary operations are required in the encoding and decoding processes, which decrease the computational complex. We further analyze the performance of the resulting broadcast scheme, and show that significant improvements in transmission efficiency are obtained as compared to previously proposed ARQ and network-coding- based schemes.