Improving energy efficiency in broadcasting and multicasting applications

In this thesis, the problem of transmitting data in the form of multicast and broadcast traffic has been studied. The traffic can be from a real-time application which has a short block length or it can be a general broadcast traffic in an ad-hoc network. The goal is to reduce the total number of transmissions which results in reducing the delay and improving the energy efficiency of the system. Toward this goal, network coding and fountain-codes solutions are studied in this thesis. For the case of broadcasting, a new fountain-code method is proposed. Our results show that this method increases the energy efficiency compared to other methods that have the same order of complexity. For the case of multicasting, we provide a finite block length analysis on the effect of erasure on overhead. We use this analysis to investigate a method of packet construction along with using fountain codes.