Topology-Transparent Broadcast Scheduling with Erasure Coding in Wireless Networks

Broadcasting is an important function in wireless networks. Ensuring broadcast efficiency and reliability with low communication overhead is challenging, especially with error-prone links. In this letter, we employ erasure coding together with topology-transparent scheduling as a coded transmission strategy in the MAC (Medium Access Control) layer rather than the physical layer to combat collisions and channel errors, implementing an efficient and reliable broadcast algorithm in wireless networks without introducing any additional communication overhead. We achieve the optimal frame structure that maximizes the average network throughput, and investigate the performance of our proposed algorithm in terms of the average network throughput and the packet failure probability. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm with erasure coding outperforms other existing topology-transparent broadcast algorithms and the conventional TDMA dramatically.