Design and Analysis of Relay-aided Broadcast using Binary Network Codes

We consider a base-station broadcasting a set of order-insensitive packets to a user population over packet-erasure channels. To improve efficiency we propose relay-aided transmission using instantaneously-decodable binary network coding. The proposed coding schemes have the benefits of minimal decoding delay and low complexity. We further analyze the performance of the resulting broadcast schemes, and show that significant improvements in transmission efficiency are obtained as compared to previously proposed ARQ and network-coding-based schemes.