A novel machine to machine communication strategy using rateless coding for the internet of things

Abstract

Internet of things is a shifting paradigm where almost every physical object will be furnished with sensing, communication and processing capabilities that allow them to communicate with other devices. On the other hand, machine to machine communication, which is a key enabling technology for the internet of things, enables billions of multipurpose networked devices to exchange information among themselves with minor or no human involvement. This chapter aims to investigate a novel communication strategy that considerably increases the efficiency of the channel in the multicast setting. Specifically, we consider the scenario where three devices that are close by and want to exchange their messages via a low cost relay or another device in proximity. The main advantage of the proposed scheme is twofold: (1) use of joint channel and physical layer network coding where devices simultaneously transmit their messages, (2) no decoding at the relay where relaying can be as simple as amplify and forward or de-noise and forward. Furthermore, an efficiently scalable technique for disseminating information among a large number of devices is proposed. Simulation results using practical Raptor codes show that the proposed scheme achieves a near optimal sum rate performance. Additionally, the performance of the proposed scheme is compared with traditional single user communication scheme and functional decode and forward relaying strategy.