Systems, methods, and devices for controlling transport of ratelessly coded messages

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-9615395-B2
Application number	US-201414316929-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Jun 27, 2014
Priority date	Nov 27, 2013
Publication date	Apr 4, 2017
Grant date	Apr 4, 2017

Abstract

Systems, methods, and devices for controlling transport of ratelessly coded messages are disclosed herein. User equipment (UE) may be configured to receive a data object using a plurality of radios having distinct radio protocols. The data object may divided into a plurality of segments, and the segments may be encoded with a random linear network code before transmission. The random linear network code may permit the UE to reassemble each segment from any large enough set of encoded packets. The UE may use delivery control messages with very low overhead to control the flow of packets for each radio. The UE may control the number of packets received for each segment without specifying which particular packets should be sent. The transmitters may transmit the packets with very little overhead, and encoding information for the packets may be included in the packets in a compact form.

First claim

The invention claimed is:

1. A User equipment (UE) configured to communicate with a plurality of transceivers using a plurality of distinct radio protocols, the UE comprising a processor configured to:
transmit a request for a first plurality of packets from a first transceiver over a first radio protocol and a request for a second plurality of packets from a second transceiver over a second radio protocol, wherein the first and second plurality of packets are derived from a current segment of a common data object;
process at least a portion of the first plurality of packets received using a first radio of the UE using the first radio protocol and at least a portion of the second plurality of packets received using a second radio of the UE using the second radio protocol, the first plurality of packets and the second plurality of packets received simultaneously and in parallel by the first radio and the second radio, wherein the first transceiver encodes the portion of the first plurality of packets using a linear network code and the second transceiver encodes the portion of the second plurality of packets using the linear network code;
transmit a semi-termination message to the first transceiver, wherein the semi-termination message requests the first transceiver cease transmission of packets derived from the current segment; and
receive additional packets derived from another segment from the first transceiver.

2. The UE of claim 1 , wherein the processor is configured to transmit the request for the first plurality of packets by transmitting a transmission control message indicating a maximum number of packets to transmit from the current segment, and wherein the first transceiver determines which packets to transmit.

3. The UE of claim 2 , wherein the transmission control message comprises a sequence number indicating an order of transmission.

4. The UE of claim 1 , wherein the processor is configured to initially receive an indication of a size of the data object.

5. The UE of claim 4 , wherein the processor is configured to compute a number of segments, a size of a last segment, and a size of a last source block from the size of the data object.

6. The UE of claim 1 , wherein each packet includes an encoding indicator indicative of parameters of the linear network code.

7. The UE of claim 6 , wherein the encoding indicator is randomly selected by each transceiver for each packet being transmitted.

8. The UE of claim 1 , further comprising:
a local transceiver including transmitter and receiver components;
multiple antennas, in which a first antenna of the multiple antennas is coupled to the transmitter, and in which a second antenna of the multiple antennas is coupled to the receiver;
a display touchscreen; and
a keyboard.

9. A method for transmitting packets from a base station to a mobile communication device that is receiving data using a plurality of distinct radio protocols, the method comprising:
receiving a plurality of transmission control messages from the mobile communication device, wherein the plurality of transmission control messages include a first transmission control message requesting a first quantity of packets be transmitted from a first segment of a data object and a second transmission control message requesting a second quantity of packets be transmitted from a second segment of the same data object;
transmitting at least a portion of the first quantity of packets to a first radio of the mobile communication device using a first radio protocol and at least a portion of the second quantity of packets to a second radio of the mobile communication device using a second radio protocol different from the first radio protocol simultaneously with and in parallel to the transmission of the first quantity of packets to the first radio, wherein the portion of the first quantity of packets is encoded using a fountain code and the portion of the second quantity of packets is encoded using the fountain code; and
receiving a segment completion message from the mobile communication device, wherein the segment completion message requests a stop to transmission of packets from the first segment but continuation of transmission of packets from the second segment.

10. The method of claim 9 , further comprising receiving a termination message requesting an end to transmission of all packets.

11. The method of claim 10 , wherein the transmission of packets related to the data object is controlled using solely transmission control messages, segment completion messages, and termination messages.

12. The method of claim 9 , wherein each of the plurality of transmission control messages includes a sequence number indicating an order of transmission.

13. The method of claim 9 , wherein each packet includes a segment index indicative of a segment from which the packet was derived.

14. The method of claim 9 , wherein each packet includes an encoding indicator indicative of parameters of the fountain code.

15. The method of claim 14 , further comprising generating a plurality of pseudorandom numbers by using the encoding indicator to determine an initial seed for a pseudorandom number generator, and computing one or more encoding coefficients for a payload of each packet based on a corresponding one or more of the plurality of pseudorandom numbers.

16. The method of claim 15 , wherein generating the plurality of pseudorandom numbers comprises generating the plurality of pseudorandom numbers according to the equation:
x k+1 =4 x k (1− x k ), x k ε(0,1)

wherein x k+1 is a next pseudorandom number and x k is a previous pseudorandom number, and wherein an initial seed is computed from the encoding indicator according to the equation:

x
0

=

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(

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1

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65536
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Assignees

• Intel Corp

Inventors

• Yu Yifan
• Zhang Xu
• Li Guangjie
• Li Xiang

Classifications

• H04W72/23

  in the downlink direction of a wireless link, i.e. towards a terminal · CPC title

• H04W72/51

  based on terminal or device properties · CPC title

• H04W72/21

  in the uplink direction of a wireless link, i.e. towards the network · CPC title

• H04W72/0453

  Resources in frequency domain, e.g. a carrier in FDMA · CPC title

• H04L69/321

  Interlayer communication protocols or service data unit [SDU] definitions; Interfaces between layers · CPC title