Power-aware rateless codes in mobile wireless communication

Rateless error correction codes hold great potential for increasing the capacity of practical wireless networks by obviating the need for transmitters to estimate the highest reliable rate of an unpredictable wireless channel and send information at that rate. But the accumulation and intensive processing of noisy bits works against rateless codes' adoption in mobile devices, where energy is at a premium due to limited battery capacity. In this work, we identify a new tradeoff between energy efficiency and wireless capacity that rateless codes can make in low signal-to-noise ratio or highly variable "grey zone" conditions. We propose Power-Aware Rateless Codes (PRC), a design that integrates with the medium access control portion of a rateless wireless system, giving the system a way of selectively sacrificing small amounts of wireless capacity for large savings in decoder computation effort, thus reducing radio power consumption in challenging radio environments.