Contaminated Areas Monitoring via Distributed Rateless Coding with Constrained Data Gathering

This paper presents a data gathering scheme designed for an emergency monitoring Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), which employs distributed rateless encoding and dispersion of the encoded data toward the perimeter of the monitored area, where it is collected by a mobile collector (MC). Rateless codes are low encoding/decoding complexity codes, suitable for resource constrained devices, such as sensor nodes, while the proposed distributed encoding and dispersion, performed using only local knowledge, are adapted to WSNs where the frequent changes in underlying topology and connectivity are expected. The proposed scheme allows for data persistence and efficient data gathering in the scenarios where decentralized WSNs are deployed in inaccessible locations with no infrastructure support, where nodes are prone to failures due to harsh operating conditions and where the access of the MC to the monitoring area is severely limited.