Fountain Codes with Nonuniform Selection Distributions through Feedback

One key requirement for fountain (rateless) coding schemes is to achieve a high intermediate symbol recovery rate. Recent coding schemes have incorporated the use of a feedback channel to improve intermediate performance of traditional rateless codes; however, these codes with feedback are designed based on uniformly at random selection of input symbols. In this paper, on the other hand, we develop feedback-based fountain codes with dynamically-adjusted nonuniform symbol selection distributions, and show that this characteristic can enhance the intermediate decoding rate. We provide an analysis of our codes, including bounds on computational complexity and failure probability for a maximum likelihood decoder; the latter are tighter than bounds known for classical rateless codes. Through numerical simulations, we also show that feedback information paired with a nonuniform selection distribution can highly improve the symbol recovery rate, and that the amount of feedback sent can be tuned to the specific transmission properties of a given feedback channel.Comment: Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Delay-Efficient and Reliable Data Relaying in Ultra Dense Networks using Rateless Codes

We investigate the problem of delay-efficient and reliable data delivery in ultra-dense networks (UDNs) that constitute macro base stations (MBSs), small base stations (SBSs), and mobile users. Considering a two-hop data delivery system, we propose a partial decode-and-forward (PDF) relaying strategy together with a simple and intuitive amicable encoding scheme for rateless codes to significantly improve user experience in terms of end-to-end delay. Simulation results verify that our amicable encoding scheme is efficient in improving the intermediate performance of rateless codes. It also verifies that our proposed PDF significantly improves the performance of the decode-and-forward (DF) strategy, and that PDF is much more robust against channel degradation. Overall, the proposed strategy and encoding scheme are efficient towards delay-sensitive data delivery in the UDN scenarios.Comment: Accepted for presentation at the IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM) 202

Design and Analysis of Online Fountain Codes for Intermediate Performance

For the benefit of improved intermediate performance, recently online fountain codes attract much research attention. However, there is a trade-off between the intermediate performance and the full recovery overhead for online fountain codes, which prevents them to be improved simultaneously. We analyze this trade-off, and propose to improve both of these two performance. We first propose a method called Online Fountain Codes without Build-up phase (OFCNB) where the degree-1 coded symbols are transmitted at first and the build-up phase is removed to improve the intermediate performance. Then we analyze the performance of OFCNB theoretically. Motivated by the analysis results, we propose Systematic Online Fountain Codes (SOFC) to further reduce the full recovery overhead. Theoretical analysis shows that SOFC has better intermediate performance, and it also requires lower full recovery overhead when the channel erasure rate is lower than a constant. Simulation results verify the analyses and demonstrate the superior performance of OFCNB and SOFC in comparison to other online fountain codes