Erasure Coding Based Efficient Communication for Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoTs) becomes an important research area in recent years. In IoTs, the energy is a precious resource. A lot of energy is spent on wireless communication, the information exchange between nodes. For the dynamically changing nature of wireless links, the communication between nodes is complicated and unreliable. An efficient communication protocol is desired to effectively improve the IoTs' performance and extend its life. In this paper, considering the limited energy resource and the nature of ad hoc networks, we review the previous protocols and propose a new protocol that exploits Erasure Coding for energy efficiency. The proposed protocol is stateless and works in a distributed manner. The original sender encodes the message into multiple packets with Erasure Coding and broadcasts out these packets. The receivers that do not receive all the packets will rebroadcast the received packets after back-off unless overhearing enough rebroadcasts from neighbors. The back-off is proportionate to the percentage of packets received. Mathematical analysis and simulations verify the viability of our protocol, and shows its better efficiency.