Rateless forward error correction for topology-transparent scheduling

Topology-transparent scheduling for mobile wireless ad hoc networks has been treated as a theoretical curiosity. This paper makes two contributions towards its practical deployment: 1) We generalize the combinatorial requirement on the schedules and show that the solution is a cover-free family. As a result, a much wider number and variety of constructions for schedules exist to match network conditions. 2) In simulation, we closely match the theoretical bound on expected throughput. The bound was derived assuming acknowledgments are available immediately. We use rateless forward error correction (RFEC) as an acknowledgment scheme with minimal computational overhead. Since the wireless medium is inherently unreliable, RFEC also offers some measure of automatic adaptation to channel load. These contributions renew interest in topology-transparent scheduling when delay is a principal objective.