Network routing over erasure channels using systematic rateless codes

Rateless Codes can reduce the costs of retransmissions over erasure channels. It has been shown in the literature that having a systematic part in a rateless codes enhances its performance. This paper proposes an extended systematic rateless encoding scheme to improve performance. The scheme is easy to analyze and implement. We also study several fixed and opportunistic routing protocols for a network where the nodes use systematic rateless code schemes for communication. Their performance is studied through analysis and simulations in a network scenario.