Rateless packet approach for data gathering in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we propose a novel approach for data gathering in wireless sensor networks (WSN) based on distributed rateless codes. Rateless codes are an efficient, low- complexity solution for coded data transmission over channels with packet erasures, which motivates their application in dis- tributed network scenarios such as WSN. Recently proposed distributed rateless coding techniques for WSN are node-centric, i.e., collecting sufficient number of different sensor data packets and performing rateless encoding is the task of sensor nodes. In the proposed packet-centric approach, this task is assigned to encoded packets called rateless packets. While randomly moving through the network, rateless packets collect and encode into their content required number of uniformly sampled sensor data packets, completing their paths in randomly selected network nodes. Using this approach, any degree distribution of rateless codes can be exactly obtained. The problem of uniform combining of sensor data into rateless packets, and uniform dispersion throughout the network is addressed. The efficiency of the proposed scheme and comparison with the performance of centralized rateless codes are demonstrated by simulation results.