Reliable multicast with network coding

Abstract

Reliable multicast, the lossless dissemination of data from one sender to a group of receivers, has a wide range of important applications like software update and dissemination of stock quotes. Recently, network coding has been applied to the reliable multicast in wireless networks, where the sender encodes multiple lost packets together into one packet and uses a single retransmission to potentially recover multiple packet losses, resulting in a significant reduction of band-width consumption. In this paper, we provide a review of recent research works in this area, examine their advantages and limitations, and also present some open research challenges need to be addressed in the future.