Encoded packet-Assisted Rescue Approach to Reliable Unicast in Wireless Networks

Recently, network coding technique has emerged as a promising approach that supports reliable transmission over wireless loss channels. In existing protocols where users have no interest in considering the encoded packets they had in coding or decoding operations, this rule is expensive and inefficient. This paper studies the impact of encoded packets in the reliable unicast network coding via some theoretical analysis. Using our approach, receivers do not only store the encoded packets they overheard, but also report these information to their neighbors, such that users enable to take account of encoded packets in their coding decisions as well as decoding operations. Moreover, we propose a redistribution algorithm to maximize the coding opportunities, which achieves better retransmission efficiency. Finally, theoretical analysis and simulation results for a wheel network illustrate the improvement in retransmissions efficiency due to the encoded packets.