Application Layer Coding for IoT: Benefits, Limitations, and Implementation Aspects

One of the key technologies for future Internet of things (IoT)/machine-to-machine systems is low-power wide area networks, which are designed to support a massive number of low-end devices, often in the unlicensed shared spectrum using random access protocols. However, these usually operate without centralized control and since automatic repeat-request and acknowledgment mechanisms are not very effective due to the strict duty cycles limits and high interference in the shared bands, many packets are lost from collisions. In this paper, we analyze a recently proposed application layer coding scheme introduced in [1], which aims to recover lost packets by introducing redundancy in the form of a fountain code. We show how latency and decoding complexity is affected by the packet loss rate but also prove that there is a limit to what can be achieved by introducing more redundancy. The analysis is backed up by simulation results.