A comparative analysis of physical-layer rateless coding architectures

Abstract

An analysis of rateless codes implemented at the physical layer is developed. Our model takes into account two aspects of practical communication system design that are abstracted away in many existing works on the subject. In particular, our model assumes that : (1) practical error detection methods are used to determine when to terminate decoding; and (2) performance and reliability as observed at the transport layer are the metrics of interest. Within the context of these assumptions, we then evaluate two recently proposed high-performing rateless codes. Using our analysis to guide an empirical study, the process of selecting the best rateless code for a given set of system constraints is illustrated.