Towards a smart universe: One droplet at a time

The development of smart platforms in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm requires a number of technological advances to go hand in hand. IoT devices and entities have very diverse set of capabilities in terms of memory, power, and processing and are connected via a wide range of links with various qualities and capacities. This work focuses on the design of state-of-the-art data transmission methodology with arguably the highest level of flexibility and adaptability. We present a novel fountain-based encoding technique using overlapped generations of Luby-Transform (LT) codes. The proposed overlapped LT (OLT) codes achieve significant gains in BER and/or code rate. They are highly energy-efficient, scalable, and robust. Our analysis shows in particular that by using OLT codes, we can modify the fountain degree distribution such that it does not contain degree-one packets starting from the second generation. Thus, we introduce new degree distributions to improve the performance of OLT codes; the new scheme is referred to as smart OLT (SOLT). Simulation results are provided to show the improvements of OLT and SOLT codes in AWGN channel in terms of error rate. For example, SOLT codes can achieve the same error performance as LT codes, but they require smaller transmission overhead, for instance, at SNR of 9 dB and error rate of 10^-5, SOLT codes require a code rate of 0.476 while LT codes require a code rate of 0.417.