RCDP: Raptor-based content delivery protocol for unicast communication in wireless networks for ITS

Recent advances in forward error correction (FEC) coding techniques were focused on addressing the challenges of multicast and broadcast delivery. However, FEC approaches can also be used for unicast content delivery in order to solve transmission control protocol issues found in wireless networks. In thispaper, we exploit the error resilient properties of Raptor codes by proposing Raptor-based content delivery protocol (RCDP) — a novel solution for reliable and bidirectional unicast communication in lossy links that can improve content delivery in situations where the wireless network is the bottleneck. RCDP has been designed, validated, optimized, and its performance has been analyzed in terms of throughput and resource efficiency. Experimental results show that RCDP is a highly efficient solution for environments characterized by high delays and packet losses making it very suitable for intelligent transport system oriented applications since it achieves significant performance improvements when compared to traditional transport layer protocols.