On energy efficiency of rateless packet scheme for distributed data storage in wireless sensor networks

Distributed encoding of WSN generated data based on network and fountain coding principles has attracted considerable attention lately. The proposed solutions offer low-complexity distributed data storage and increase data robustness to node failures. Rateless packet approach is recently proposed distributed rateless coding solution which performs closely to centralized rateless codes and is simple for implementation. However, rateless packet solution is based on random walks of rateless packets on WSN graph, which may require significant communication and energy resources for the distributed encoding process. In this paper, we explore this problem further, comparing the rateless packet approach with the “dummy” centralized approach to perform the same task. While investigating and evaluating the two approaches, we point out the benefits of the rateless packet scheme, focusing in this paper on communication/energy requirements, rather than the overall coding efficiency.