Analysis of Header Management for LT Codes in IoTs Netwok

Fountain codes are new generation of FEC codes that offer rateless transmission on erasure channel. Most of previous studies of fountain codes focused on improving theoretical bound of encoding and decoding algorithms and so far, we did not find any that discuss implementation of these codes in real applications. Fountain codes have originally been designed for multicast and multimedia applications however the use of fountain codes was lately extended to other types of network including low-powered communications such as in IoT applications. The discussion on fountain codes implementation in network point of view is very limited. We know that with fountain codes, parity matrix is needed to be communicated to the decoders during or prior to data transmission. From literature review, we found one paper that has mentioned the usage of association key or seed to randomly generate the same parity matrix for both parties. Although using association key may be beneficial in multimedia applications where fountain codes have originally been designed for, transmission overhead has been shown to be less beneficial when applied with low-data communications. In this work, we proposed another header management scheme that allows reducing transmission overhead by including an array list of connections which identifies a list of original symbols encoded inside each frame. The experiment was performed and it has been shown that the proposed technique is more beneficial to be deployed in a small network such as in sensor networks or in IoT applications.