On the Max2-Min network coding for wireless data broadcasting

In wireless broadcasting systems, lost packets are retransmitted to guarantee the correct reception of each packet. Traditional automatic retransmission request (ARQ) protocol retransmits one packet per slot, which leads to low spectrum efficiency. In this paper, we propose a Max2-Min Network Coding based Wireless BroadCasting (WBC) protocol. Specifically, to reduce the overall number of retransmissions, lost packets of different user equipments (UEs) are combined by performing Max2-Min network coding (NC) at the base station. Then, NC combined packets are broadcasted to all the UEs. At each UE, lost packets can be recovered by using the proposed joint network and recursive systematic convolution (RSC) decoder (JNRD). Theoretical analyses and simulation results show that the proposed Max2-Min NC based WBC protocol outperforms traditional NC based WBC protocol on the average number of transmissions performance.