Nonlinear network code for high throughput broadcasting with retransmissions

Abstract

In a typical network coding scenario, a node has to broadcast a set of messages to a group of receiver nodes who have already received a subset of the messages through other links. In this paper, we will first present the achievable rate region for this broadcasting scenario, and then extend the result to the case with retransmissions. With the proposed nonlinear network coding strategy, the achievable rate region can be achieved without requiring the exact knowledge of a priori information available at the receiver nodes. The broadcasting node simply performs retransmissions with independent codebooks until every receiver node has received the whole set of messages. Through the analysis of network throughput, we will show that each receiver node is able to effectively accumulate mutual information over the multiple transmissions thus achieving higher overall throughput than the conventional random linear network coding strategy.