Preliminary Results on the Performance of an Adaptive Protocol for Packet Relay with Fountain Coding

We present our initial findings in the investigation of an adaptive protocol for relaying of information in tactical packet-radio networks. Our protocol employs fountain codes to facilitate a relaying scheme involving two relays for improved throughput. In addition, the protocol adapts the modulation format and error-control code for each packet transmission in response to the time-varying propagation loss in the channel. The adaptation is carried out with the help of simple statistics that can be easily derived from the decoder.