Making the Most of Sporadic Feedback: Low-Complexity Application-Layer Coding for Data Recovery in the Internet of Things

Abstract: We propose application-layer coding schemes to recover lost data in delay-sensitive uplink (sensor-to-gateway) communications in the Internet of Things. Built on an approach that combines retransmissions and forward erasure correction, the proposed schemes' salient features include low computational complexity and the ability to exploit sporadic receiver feedback for efficient data recovery. Reduced complexity is achieved by keeping the number of coded transmissions as low as possible and by devising a mechanism to compute the optimal degree of a coded packet in O(1). Our major contributions are: (a) An enhancement to an existing scheme called windowed coding, whose complexity is greatly reduced and data recovery performance is improved by our proposed approach. (b) A technique that combines elements of windowed coding with a new feedback structure to further reduce the coding complexity and improve data recovery. (c) A coded forwarding scheme in which a relay node provides further resilience against packet loss by overhearing source-to-destination communications and making forwarding decisions based on overheard information.