An Optimized Multicast Scheme for Data Burst Dissemination over Satellite Links

This correspondence focuses on critical information exchanges between two remote multicast groups via a satellite system for emergency and alerting scenarios. In particular, we deal here with the use of an efficient Network Coding (NC) communication scheme in order to reduce the data flow delivery delay, save energy, and to guarantee a reliable reception within a target outage decoding probability at all on-earth receiving end. A suitable optimization procedure is also proposed in order to achieve the best NC performance. The typical case of Rayleigh channel propagation conditions is considered in our analysis in order to validate the obtained results in realistic environments. Finally, performance comparisons with NC schemes previously proposed for multicast reliable satellite communications and a negative acknowledged based alternative are provided to clearly highlight the better behavior of the proposed NC scheme.