Towards increasing diversity for the relaying of LT Fountain Codes in Wireless Sensor Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes diversity-enhanced relaying strategies for Luby Transform fountain codes in wireless sensor networks to improve transmission performance while maintaining low decoding complexity.

Contribution

It introduces novel diversity strategies tailored for LT codes, balancing high performance with low decoding complexity in linear network topologies.

Findings

Improved transmission reliability with diversity strategies.

Maintained low decoding complexity for LT codes.

Effective in networks with imperfect channel states.

Abstract

Diversity is a powerful means to increase the transmission performance of wireless communications. For the case of fountain codes relaying, it has been shown previously that introducing diversity is also beneficial since it counteracts transmission losses on the channel. Instead of simply hop-by-hop forwarding information, each sensor node diversifies the information flow using XOR combinations of stored packets. This approach has been shown to be efficient for random linear fountain codes. However, random linear codes exhibit high decoding complexity. In this paper, we propose diversity increased relaying strategies for the more realistic Luby Transform code in order to maintain high transmission performance with low decoding computational complexity in a linear network. Results are provided herein for a linear network assuming uniform imperfect channel states.