Rateless Coded Chain Cooperation in Linear Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

Rateless codes can be used for mutual information accumulation in multi-hop wireless networks. However, the impact of spatial reuse and/or node cooperation on performance of the linear multi-hop network employing rateless codes has not been carefully studied yet. In this paper, we present three rateless coded forwarding schemes in linear multi-hop networks, namely, multi-hop forwarding with no spatial reuse, multi-hop forwarding with spatial reuse, and cooperative forwarding with spatial reuse. By analyzing and comparing their performance, we conclude that mutual information accumulation with spatial reuse improves the average throughput but induces a larger latency, while node cooperation, based on rateless codes and spatial reuse, reduces the average delay but suffers a throughput loss.