Increased reliability or reduced delay in wireless industrial networks using relaying and Luby codes

Providing reliable and timely communication in wireless industrial networks is crucial. Previous research has shown that relaying can aid in achieving this goal. We consider the case when relay resources are sparse such that each relay needs to aid e.g., three different sensor nodes and propose to combine relaying with Luby codes. We let the relay node construct a Luby coded packet using the three source packets as input. The destination can then use the Luby coded packet to recover an erroneous or lost source packet regardless of which source that packet belonged to. The performance evaluation shows that our proposed scheme significantly increases the number of correctly received packets before the corresponding deadlines, or alternatively that high reliability can be maintained even if fewer time slots are allocated for retransmissions, thus lowering the delay.