The capacity benefit of network coding has been extensively studied in wired and wireless networks. Moreover, it has been shown that network coding improves network reliability by reducing the number of packet retransmissions in lossy networks. However, the extent of the reliability benefit of network coding is not known. In this work, we characterize the reliability benefit of network coding for reliable multicasting. In particular, we show that the expected number of transmissions using link-by-link ARQ compared to network coding to send a packet from the multicast source to K receivers scales as Θ( log K log log K ). Index Terms Network coding, multicast, reliability, ARQ, asymptotic analysis.
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