Rateless coding for gaussian channels

Uri Erez*, Mitchell D. Trott, Gregory W. Wornell

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

A rateless code-i.e., a rate-compatible family of codes-has the property that codewords of the higher rate codes are prefixes of those of the lower rate ones. A perfect family of such codes is one in which each of the codes in the family is capacity-achieving. We show by construction that perfect rateless codes with low-complexity decoding algorithms exist for additive white Gaussian noise channels. Our construction involves the use of layered encoding and successive decoding, together with repetition using time-varying layer weights. As an illustration of our framework, we design a practical three-rate code family. We further construct rich sets of near-perfect rateless codes within our architecture that require either significantly fewer layers or lower complexity than their perfect counterparts. Variations of the basic construction are also developed, including one for time-varying channels in which there is no a priori stochastic model.

Original languageEnglish
Article number6145513
Pages (from-to)530-547
Number of pages18
JournalIEEE Transactions on Information Theory
Volume58
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 2012

Keywords

  • Hybrid ARQ (H-ARQ)
  • Incremental redundancy
  • Rate-compatible punctured codes
  • Static broadcasting

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