Retransmission in the network-coding-based packet network

In this paper, retransmission strategies of the network-coding-based packet network are investigated. We propose two retransmission strategies, the packet-loss-edge-based retransmission strategy (PLERT) and the minimum retransmission strategy (MRT), which focus on optimizing the retransmission efficiency without the constraint on the encoding field size. We compared the performances of the proposed retransmission strategies with the traditional automatic repeat-request (ARQ) strategy and the random retransmission strategy. Simulation results showed that the PLERT strategy works well when the packet loss rate is small. Among these retransmission strategies, the performance of the MRT strategy is the best at the cost of the high complexity that is still polynomial. Furthermore, neither of the proposed strategies is sensitive to the encoding field size.