End-to-end Delay Analysis for Reliable Communications over Lossy Channels: Integrating Network Coding and ARQ Schemes

This paper deals with the evaluation of the end-to-end packet delay for a lossy network where network coding is adopted to achieve better performance. Differently from previous published papers on this subject, connection oriented services are assumed, this means that packets have to be in-order received and wait at the receiver buffer till all the previous ones have been correctly delivered. The focus is on a network model where two source nodes broadcast packets to a group of two sink nodes over lossy wireless channels. Three different alternatives have been considered in order to assure a reliable data multicasting, namely: a classical random linear network coding scheme, a linear network coding combined with a basic ARQ or, alternatively, with a soft combined ARQ scheme. Performance comparisons provided by means of analytical and numerical results clearly highlight that the better solution is to adopt the latter alternative.