Probabilistic cooperative coded forwarding for broadcast transmissions in industrial mobile edge communications

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is considered as a key enabler for the industrial internet of things (IIoT) to cope with the ever-increasing communication and computing demands of nodes. In consideration of the limited resource of the IIoT nodes, it is necessary to design cost-effective multi-hop data transmission schemes for mobile edge IIoTs. However, most of the traditional schemes have to spend enormous cost to meet the reliability requirement, which cannot support timely information processing of MEC-based IIoT. In this article, the probabilistic cooperative coded forwarding (PCCF) scheme for multi-hop data transmission in mobile edge IIoTs is proposed to address the above problem. First, the data packets are encoded at a source IIoT node using the systematic sparse network coding (SSNC) mechanism, then the source broadcasts the coded packets to its one-hop neighbors. To minimize the required number of redundant coded packets, the sparsity of coded packets is optimized. Second, the nodes which received the packets will become volunteer relay nodes and forward the coded packets using the cooperative coded forwarding (CCF) mechanism. The volunteer relays first forward the received coded packets with a forwarding probability, and then re-encode a pair of received coded packets and broadcast the re-encoded packet with a re-encoding probability. To guarantee the broadcast performance while minimizing the transmission number at relay nodes, the feasible forwarding and re-encoding probability are provided. Third, the receiver nodes will try to decode the received coded and re-encoded packets and recover data packets without sending acknowledgments. Finally, through a series of experiments, we verify the accuracy of analytical approximations and also find out the optimal sparsity of coded packets and the existence of minimum transmission numbers. These provide insights for further optimization of multi-hop data transmission in mobile edge IIoTs.