Erasure codes for reliable communication in internet of things (iot) embedded with wireless sensors

Abstract

With billions of devices adding up to the internet, broadly termed as Internet of Things (IoT), the need for reliable communication, distributed storage and computation has seamlessly increased. At this juncture, need for reliable communication, distributed storage and computation, adoption of error correcting codes and erasure codes plays a significant role. In this chapter, we give an overview of construction of erasure codes required for reliable communication with emphasis on Internet of Things (IoT) communication which have wireless sensors or sensor networks as its core. Wireless sensors form an integral part of Internet of Things (IoT) devices bridging the virtual world and the real world. Achieving reliability in such networks is highly desirable due to their broad range of applications. The discussed erasure codes in this chapter can be directly employed or with little modification in the context of reliable communication in Internet of Things. In this chapter, the two methods of information transmission, end-to-end transmission and hop-by-hop transmission, prevalent in digital communication scenario is discussed in detail with emphasis on with and without erasure coding. Also, the erasure codes used extensively in the context of achieving reliability in wireless sensor communication namely Reed-Solomon codes, Fountain codes and Decentralized Erasure codes are discussed and compared. This chapter serves as a starting point for researchers interested in working on reliability aspects of communication in Internet of Things embedded with wireless sensors and cyber physical systems.