Routing with mutual information accumulation in energy-limited wireless networks

We consider the problem of minimum energy unicast routing in the presence of idealistic rateless codes. The nodes on the path are able to accumulate mutual information from the transmissions of the previous nodes on the path. We first consider the case of nodes with unlimited energy and propose an algorithm that outperforms a method proposed in the recent literature. We then consider the case with limited-energy nodes. We prove by counter examples that some properties that hold in the unlimited energy case, do not hold anymore in the limited energy case. Next we describe a suboptimal algorithm and compare its performance with the optimal solution.