Symbol-level reliable broadcasting of sensitive data in error-prone wireless networks

• A novel transmission approach based on the importance of symbols is considered.
• In the case of single packet, we propose an algorithm, and prove its optimality.
• We extend the proposed method to the case of multiple packets.
• We enhance the gain of the proposed method using symbol-level network coding.

Reliable packet transmission over error-prone wireless networks has received a lot of attention from the research community. In this paper, instead of using simple packet retransmissions to provide reliability, we consider a novel retransmission approach, which is based on the importance of bits (symbols). We study the problem of maximizing the total gain in the case of partial data delivery in error-prone wireless networks, in which each set of bits (called symbols) has a different weight. We first address the case of one-hop single packet transmission, and prove that the optimal solution that maximizes the total gain has a round-robin symbol transmission pattern. Then, we extend our solution to the case of multiple packets. We also enhance the expected gain using random linear network coding. Our simulation results show that our proposed multiple packets transmission mechanism can increase the gain up to 60%, compared to that of a simple retransmission. Moreover, our network coding scheme enhances the expected total gain up to 15%, compared to our non-coding mechanism.