Raptor Codes Based Distributed Storage Algorithms for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract: We consider a distributed storage problem in a large-scale wireless sensor network with $n$ nodes among which $k$ acquire (sense) independent data. The goal is to disseminate the acquired information throughout the network so that each of the $n$ sensors stores one possibly coded packet and the original $k$ data packets can be recovered later in a computationally simple way from any $(1+\epsilon)k$ of nodes for some small $\epsilon>0$. We propose two Raptor codes based distributed storage algorithms for solving this problem. In the first algorithm, all the sensors have the knowledge of $n$ and $k$. In the second one, we assume that no sensor has such global information.