Fault-tolerant minimal retransmission mechanism with network coding

A new coding mechanism is provided to automatically detect and recover lost packets in wireless lossy networks. Contrary to the majority of automatic repeat request (ARQ) algorithms relying on acknowledgment, our mechanism extracts feedback on packet delivery by analyzing received network coded messages and automatically reacts when packet loss is sensed. Compared to traditional end-to-end ARQ, our proposed mechanism shows significant reduction in the number of transmissions required to exchange the same amount of data.