Adaptive rateless coding with feedback for cooperative relay networks

Cooperation among nodes is proposed as an effective means of combating fading and for enhancing system´s overall capacity and coverage. The robustness of rateless codes makes them particularly attractive for such networks. Yet, the decoding aspects of rateless codes are discarded in most of the traditional distributed networks. In this paper, the intermediate packet decodability of rateless codes is exploited to reduce the number of packets being processed at the relay nodes. This is achieved by harnessing the back channel (from destination to relays) for feedback. The relay transmissions and processing are thereby confined to assist the receiver in decoding the remaining information. It is shown both analytically and through simulation studies that such a scheme achieves significant savings in computation complexity, memory usage and overall energy consumption.