Spectrally Efficient Packet Recovery in Delay Constrained Rateless Coded Multihop Networks

Rateless codes have been found to be particularly attractive for decode and forward based relaying strategy in delay tolerant multihop networks. The latency performance of such networks is dependent on the worst links that results in the starvation of subsequent nodes with good channel conditions. The total delay suffered by such networks can be constrained by limiting the number of rateless coded transmissions, especially for applications with critical latency requirements. However, the performance of rateless codes deteriorates in such circumstances due to the lack of sufficient mutual information for successfully recovering the entire source packets. The fraction of source packets that can be recovered will depend on the encoded packets received across the transmission channel. This paper investigates the degradation in the performance of such rateless coded networks by deriving the average packet recovery rate. In order to improve the reliability in such delay constrained networks, a novel spectrally efficient transmission scheme for reliable multihop data transfer is proposed. The proposed scheme exploits the broadcast nature of wireless transmissions, which provides an inherent implicit feedback channel, to ensure the reliable delivery of information packets to the nodes in the network. Rather than allocating dedicated channels to feedback the packet recovery information, the implicit feedback channel determines such information which enhances the spectral efficiency. Further, the optimum number of packets recoverable within the specified delay constraint to reduce the reprocessing of lost packets across hops is analytically analysed in this paper.