On Network Coding for Reliable Multicast via Satellite

Abstract

We present within this work recent advances on packet-level coding for a reliable multicast via satellite, based on the adoption of non-binary fountain codes, discussing design and implementation challenges. In particular, we describe the integration of fountain codes on two laboratory demonstrator systems and we provide a finite length encoding/decoding complexity analysis. Based on numerical results, we assess the performance improvement, in terms of decoding failure rate, obtained by moving to higher order Galois fields and we compare, in terms of required retransmissions, a scheme based on non-binary fountain codes to a scheme based on the traditional Selective Repeat Automatic Repeat reQuest (SR-ARQ) protocol. In conclusion, the results show the superiority of non-binary fountain codes with respect to traditional schemes.