Reliability Gain of Network Coding

The capacity gain of network coding has been extensively studied in wired and wireless networks. Recently, it has been shown that network coding improves network reliability by reducing the number of packet retransmissions in lossy networks. However, the extent of the reliability benefit of network coding is not known. This paper quantifies the reliability gain of network coding for reliable multicasting in a wireless network where network coding is most promising. The authors define the expected number of transmissions per packet as the performance metric for reliability and derive analytical expressions characterizing the performance of network coding.