Abstract:

Satellite communication channels have the properties of natural broadcasting and wide area coverage, which make it attractive to carry out multicast services in satellite networks. However, the features of long transmission delay, high bit error and nonsymmetrical link cause large number of message loss, making it difficult to guarantee the multicast reliability. We propose a reliable multicast mechanism named NCM based on the network coding for satellite networks. NCM can recover multiple lost packets locally at the receiving end via sending redundant coding information generated from the original data packets. At the same time, combining with the mechanism of Automatic Repeating reQuest（ARQ）, it can restore multiple lost primitive packets by retransmitting only one coded package when the original and its redundant coded messages are lost simultaneously. Theoretical analysis and simulation results validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the mechanism.

Key words: reliable multicast;satellite network;network coding;retransmission;NCM