Abstract
Traditional approaches have used either channel coding or retransmission mechanisms to cope with errors/losses occurring during data communications. But either of them is not sufficient to achieve highly reliable communications over error-prone wireless channels. Network coding can significantly reduce communication loads and thus improve bandwidth and energy efficiency for green communications. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid approach that integrates network coding, channel coding, and Auto Repeat Request (ARQ) mechanism to increase the coding and energy efficiency of wireless networks. In particular, the proposed approach combines the non-binary Reed-Solomon channel coding with the linear random network coding scheme and further incorporates with the ARQ technique. Performance analysis with an example network topology shows that the proposed approach can achieve significant gains for both reliable and green communications in wireless networks.