Network coding based wireless broadcast with performance guarantee

Abstract

Wireless broadcast has been increasingly used to deliver information of common interest to a large number of users. There are two major challenges in wireless broadcast: the unreliable nature of wireless links and the difficulty of acknowledging the correct reception of every broadcast packet by every user when the number of users becomes large. In this paper, by resorting to stochastic geometry analysis, we develop a network coding based broadcast scheme that allows a base station (BS) to broadcast a given number of packets to a large number of users, without user acknowledgment, while being able to provide a performance guarantee on the probability of successful delivery. Further, the BS only has limited statistical information about the environment including the spatial distribution of users (instead of their exact locations and number) and the wireless propagation model. Performance analysis is conducted. On that basis, an upper and a lower bound on the number of packet transmissions required to meet the performance guarantee are obtained. Simulations are conducted to validate the accuracy of the theoretical analysis. The technique and analysis developed in this paper are useful for designing efficient and reliable wireless broadcast strategies.