An Efficient Network Coding based Retransmission Algorithm for Wireless Multicasts

Abstract

Retransmission based on packet acknowledgement (ACK/NAK) is a fundamental error control technique employed in IEEE 802.11-2007 unicast network. However the 802.11-2007 standard falls short of proposing a reliable MAC-level recovery protocol for multicast frames. In this paper we propose a latency and bandwidth efficient coding algorithm based on the principles of network coding for retransmitting lost packets in a singlehop wireless multicast network and demonstrate its effectiveness over previously proposed network coding based retransmission algorithms.