Recently, network coding has been applied to the loss recovery of reliable broadcast transmission in wireless networks. Since it was proved that fi nding the optimal set of lost packets for XOR-ing is a complex NP-complete problem, the available time-based retransmission scheme and its enhanced retransmission scheme have exponential computational complexity and thus are not scalable to large networks. In this paper, we present an efficient heuristic scheme based on hypergraph coloring and also its enhanced heuristic scheme to improve the transmission efficiency. Basically, our proposed schemes fi rst create a hypergraph according to the packet-loss matrix. Then our schemes solve the problem of generating XORed packets by coloring the edges of hypergraph. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that, the heuristic scheme based on hypergraph coloring and its enhanced scheme can achieve almost the same transmission efficiency as the available ones, but have much lower computational complexity, which is very important for the wireless devices without high computation capacity.
