Efficient Rateless Coded Multi-Hop Relaying with Joint Energy and Information Accumulation

Due to the broadcast nature of wireless transmissions, overheard signals can be exploited in multi- hop wireless networks so as to improve the network performance. It has been shown that energy accumulation and information accumulation are two main approaches to utilize multiple overheard signals. However, how to jointly accumulate energy and information in multi-hop wireless networks is still unknown. In this paper, we propose a new rateless coded relaying scheme in linear multi-hop wireless networks, where energy and information can be jointly accumulated by superimposing two rateless-coded packets generated from the same information bits using different codebooks. The average end-to-end throughput is analyzed. Furthermore, we formulate an optimization problem to find the optimal power allocation ratio and obtain the least transmission time for relay nodes. Simulation results will show that compared to pure energy accumulation and pure information accumulation, our proposed scheme can achieve much higher throughput.