Cooperative Communications for Reliable Data Transport with Fountain Codes

Providing efficient and reliable data transport is a challenging problem for a variety of emerging applications which require reliable data packet delivery in wireless networks. In this paper, we propose to incorporate fountain codes at transport layer in the notion of cooperative relay communications to provide reliability and robustness for data transmission in wireless networks. Our basic idea is to exploit the joint merits of fountain codes and cooperative relay communications. We first derive the achievable rate of cooperative communications with fountain codes based on a general 3-node relay model and find that substantial improvement can be achieved compared with direct transmission and conventional AF and DF relay approaches. Inspired by this finding, we develop two cooperative communication strategies and analyze their performance. Numerical results show that our proposed approaches can achieve significant performance improvement in terms of data transport efficiency. In addition, the proposed approaches exhibit strong robustness to packet losses on wireless links for data transfer.