Opportunistic fountain coding with coordinative routing

Fountain codes are widely employed to improve reliability and efficiency in wireless communication systems due to their simple coding mechanisms. In this letter, we propose an opportunistic decoding and recoding mechanism with coordinative routing algorithm for fountain codes to improve the expected transmission counts (ETX) performance and to reduce computational complexity of fountain decoding at each relay in multi-hop wireless sensor networks. The full recovery in existing cooperative fountain coded networks is replaced by a new partial decoding and recoding mechanism in which both the recovered and the unrecovered packets at the intermediate nodes are considered as recoding candidates. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm is superior to the existing opportunistic routing-based fountain code schemes.