Recently, network coding has been applied to the loss recovery of reliable multicast in wireless networks, where multiple lost packets are XOR-ed together as one packet and forwarded via single retransmission, resulting in a significant reduction of bandwidth consumption. In this paper, we first prove that maximizing the number of lost packets for XOR-ing, which is the key part of the available network coding-based reliable multicast schemes, is actually a complex NP-complete problem. To address this limitation, we then propose an efficient heuristic algorithm for finding an approximately optimal solution of this optimization problem. Furthermore, we show that the packet coding principle of maximizing the number of lost packets for XOR-ing sometimes cannot fully exploit the potential coding opportunities, and we then further propose new heuristic-based schemes with a new coding principle. Simulation results demonstrate that the heuristic-based schemes have very low computational complexity and can achieve almost the same transmission efficiency as the current coding-based high-complexity schemes. Furthermore, the heuristic-based schemes with the new coding principle not only have very low complexity, but also slightly outperform the current high-complexity ones.

A fundamental problem in a pure Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing system is how to protect the anonymity of peer nodes when providing efficient data access services. Most of existing work mainly focus on how to provide the initiator anonymity, but neglect the anonymity of the responder. In this paper, we propose a multicast-based protocol, called Mapper, for efficient file sharing with mutual anonymity. By seamlessly combining the technologies of multi-proxy and IP multicast together, the proposed protocol guarantees mutual anonymity during the entire session of file retrieval. Furthermore, Mapper replicates requested files inside the multicast group, so file distribution can be adjusted adaptively and the cost for multicast can be further reduced. Results of both simulations and theoretical analyses demonstrate that Mapper possesses the merits of scalability, reliability, and high adaptability.