Performance of Fountain Codes over Wireless Mobile Relay Network

Cooperative communications, where parallel relays forward information to a destination node, can effectively improve the latency in ad hoc networks. In practice, the performance of data transmission often compromises with the variation of channel coefficient and the mobility of network nodes. The conventional fixed rate cooperative relaying cannot make the outage probability reach zero without having precise channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter. In this paper we study the performance of using fountain codes in a mobile relay network. Specifically, we develop both feedback and non-feedback fountain coded cooperative communication protocols and analyze the performance of these protocols in terms of transmission efficiency. It is observed that the number of total relay nodes plays a significant role on the performance improvement. Simulation results justify that the proposed feedback based protocol always outperforms its non-feedback counterpart in a variety of metrics. Key–Words: ad hoc networks, cooperative communications, fountain codes, relay.