Enhanced packet delivery in delay limited rateless coded multihop networks

In rateless coded networks, packets get transmitted at rates dependent on the instantaneous channel states of the wireless links between nodes. The overall latency suffered by such networks forces to conserve the end-to-end delay, especially for real-time applications, by limiting the number of rateless coded transmissions. However in such delay constrained networks (DCNs), the performance of rateless codes deteriorates due to the lack of sufficient mutual information for successfully recovering the entire source packets. In this context, a novel spectrally efficient transmission scheme for reliable multihop data transfer is proposed in this paper. The proposed scheme ensures the reliable delivery of information packets to the nodes in the network by exploiting the broadcast nature of wireless transmission. This inherent implicit feedback channel is utilised to determine the packet loss across hops. This paper also analytically analyses the optimum number of packets retrievable within the specified delay constraint to minimize packet loss across hops.