FTS: A Distributed Energy-Efficient Broadcasting Scheme Using Fountain Codes for Multihop Wireless Networks

We investigate the problem of reliable and energy-efficient one-to-all broadcasting in multihop wireless networks, and propose fractional transmission scheme (FTS) - a low-complexity and scalable broadcasting scheme. FTS exploits the broadcasting nature of wireless channels and random encoding of rateless codes to reduce energy consumption while ensuring reliable delivery of packets to all nodes in the network. In the proposed scheme, different neighbors of a node share the responsibility of transmitting packets by sending only a fraction of encoded packets required by the node to successfully receive the data sent by the source. A detailed analysis of the performance of FTS is presented for grid and random deployment networks. Further, extensive simulations compare our scheme with present energy-efficient methods such as random linear coding, multipoint relaying, dominant pruning, and broadcast incremental power scheme. Simulations reveal that FTS offers good performance and adaptability at a low computational cost.