Enhancing MQTT-SN Performance via Fountain Codes in Extreme Conditions

Day after day, more Internet of Things (IoT) devices are joining the Internet. By 2025, it is expected to have more than 75 billion connected devices compared to only 15 billion in 2015 [1]. Despite their potential, IoT systems have many constraints such as limited capabilities and energy to mention a few. Power consumption is among the most constrained aspects of IoT devices which leads to many challenges. This becomes more challenging in extremely high erasure channel conditions where many packets may be lost due to interference and other impairments. The process of re-transmission creates a huge overhead in terms of power consumption, delay and processing. In this paper, we propose the use of LT codes at the application layer to enhance the performance of MQTT-SN protocol. Our simulation results show savings of up to 75% in power consumption, 90% in overhead, and reduction in delay by 89% for high erasure rates.