Data gathering with distributed rateless coding based on enhanced online fountain codes over wireless sensor networks

A distributed rateless coding scheme is proposed in this paper for reliable data gathering over wireless sensor networks (WSNs), where multiple source nodes communicate with a single destination node through a relay node in a two-hop fashion. First with the objection of ensuring the optimized coding strategy in the build-up stage of the conventional online fountain codes, we propose an enhanced online fountain coding scheme. Then a distributed rateless coding scheme based on the enhanced online fountain codes is designed for reliable sensed data gathering over WSNs. Moreover, the upper bound for coding redundancy is derived over binary erasure channel using the analysis of random graph process. We perform simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed distributed fountain codes. Simulation results show that the proposed data gathering scheme can introduce performance improvement in terms of coding overhead, coding/decoding complexities and feedback cost.