Energy efficient data gathering based on distributed iLT coding

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) is becoming large-scale. It's meaningful to gather sensor data quickly and efficiently. In this paper, we present a new approach to collect sensor data by distributed rateless coding. Rateless codes, such as Luby Transform (LT) codes have been proved possessing a very good property that receivers can decode all k original packets from arbitrary k(1+ε) encoded packets. Improved LT (iLT) codes with a new degree distribution are proposed. Each sensor packet does walks randomly, stops at a random node and selects the sensor packet of that node to exclusive-or (XOR) with an appropriate probability. The process continues until the required degree is achieved. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method requires less inter-communication cost to complete the encoding process. At the mean time, it also makes the data gathering much faster.