Energy-Efficient Multicasting over the Erasure Channel

We consider the problem of multicasting from a single source to multiple destinations over the erasure channel. We are interested in energy efficient communication. Our performance metric is the number of bits sent per joule of energy spent until a finite amount of packets is delivered from the source to all the destinations. We compare the performance of Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) and Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) with respect to the above performance metric. Our numerical results illustrate that RLNC is more energy efficient than ARQ when the unreliability of links is high.