The design of degree distribution for distributed fountain codes in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we first analyse bit error rate (BER) bounds of the distributed network coding (DNC) scheme based on the Luby-transform (LT) codes, which is a class of fountain codes, for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Then we investigate the effect from two parameters of the degree distributions, i.e., the degree value and the proportion of odd degree, to the performance of the LT-based DNC scheme. Based on the analysis and investigation results, a degree distribution design criteria is proposed for the DNC scheme based on fountain codes over Rayleigh fading channels. We compare the performance of the DNC scheme based on fountain codes using degree distributions designed in this paper with other schemes given in the literature. The comparison results show that the degree distributions designed by using the proposed criteria have better performance.