Capacity Bounds of Cooperative Communications with Fountain Codes

Cooperative relay has been recognized as a promising approach for improving transmission efficiency and error performance in wireless networks. A number of realizations of cooperative relay communications, such as Amplify-and-Forward (AF), Decode-and-Forward (DF), have been proposed and the capacity gain of these replay approaches has been widely investigated. In this paper, we consider a cooperative relay approach using fountain codes, called Fountain-Coding-and-Forward (FCF) and derive its upper bound of the information theoretic capacity in a general 3-node relay channel model. Numerical results reveal that the upper bound of FCF is higher than that of AF, DF and conventional direct transmission. This result suggests that cooperative relay in conjunction with fountain codes can potentially provides considerable benefits in terms of transmission capacity for reliable data transmission in wireless networks.