A Novel Machine-to-Machine Communication Strategy Using Rateless Coding for the Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) is a new paradigm where almost every physical object will be furnished with sensing, communication, and processing capabilities that allow them to communicate with other devices possibly via the internet and/or telecommunication networks. Machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, which is a key enabling technology for the IoT, enables networked devices to exchange information among themselves with minor or no human involvement. In this paper, we propose a novel coding strategy that considerably increases the efficiency of the channel in the multicast setting. Specifically, we consider the scenario where three M2M communication devices that are close by and want to exchange their messages via a low cost relay or another device in proximity. The main advantage of the proposed scheme is twofold: 1) use of joint channel and physical-layer network coding where M2M communication devices simultaneously transmit their messages and 2) no decoding at the relay where relaying can be as simple as amplify and forward or denoise and forward. Simulation results using practical Raptor codes show that the proposed scheme achieves a near-optimal sum rate performance. Furthermore, we propose an efficiently scalable technique for disseminating information among a large number of M2M communication devices.