In this paper, we consider the wireless broadcasting scenario with a source node sending some common information to a group of closely located users, where each link is subject to certain packet erasures. To ensure reliable information reception by all users, the conventional approach generally requires repeated transmission by the source until all the users are able to decode the information, which is inefficient in many practical scenarios. In this paper, by exploiting the close proximity among the users, we propose a novel two-phase wireless broadcasting protocol with user cooperations based on an efficient batched network code, known as batched sparse (BATS) code. In the first phase, the information packets are encoded into batches with BATS encoder and sequentially broadcasted by the source node until certain terminating criterion is met. In the second phase, the users cooperate with each other by exchanging the network-coded information via peer-to-peer (P2P) communications based on their respective received packets. A fully distributed and light-weight scheduling algorithm is proposed to improve the efficiency of the P2P communication in the second phase. The performance of the proposed two-phase protocol is analyzed and the channel rank distribution at the instance of decoding is derived, based on which the optimal BATS code is designed. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol outperforms most existing cooperative packet exchange schemes, especially when the inter-user links are not reliable. Lastly, the performance of the proposed scheme is further verified via testbed experiments.

In order to reduce the number of retransmissions and save power for the source node, we propose a two-phase coded scheme to achieve reliable broadcast from the source to a group of users with minimal source transmissions. In the first phase, the information packets are encoded with batched sparse (BATS) code, which are then broadcasted by the source node until the file can be cooperatively decoded by the user group. In the second phase, each user broadcasts the re-encoded packets to its peers based on their respective received packets from the first phase, so that the file can be decoded by each individual user. The performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed and the rank distribution at the moment of decoding is derived, which is used as input for designing the optimal BATS code. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can reduce the total number of retransmissions compared with the traditional single-phase broadcast with optimal erasure codes. Furthermore, since a large number of transmissions are shifted from the source node to the users, power consumptions at the source node is significantly reduced.