Stable XOR-based Policies for the Broadcast Erasure Channel with Feedback

Abstract: In this paper we describe a network coding scheme for the Broadcast Erasure Channel with multiple unicast stochastic flows, in the case of a single source transmitting packets to $N$ users, where per-slot feedback is fed back to the transmitter in the form of ACK/NACK messages. This scheme performs only binary (XOR) operations and involves a network of queues, along with special rules for coding and moving packets among the queues, that ensure instantaneous decodability. The system under consideration belongs to a class of networks whose stability properties have been analyzed in earlier work, which is used to provide a stabilizing policy employing the currently proposed coding scheme. Finally, we show the optimality of the proposed policy for $N=4$ and i.i.d. erasure events, in the sense that the policy's stability region matches a derived outer bound (which coincides with the system's information-theoretic capacity region), even when a restricted set of coding rules is used.