Nonbinary Kite codes: A family of nonbinary rate-compatible LDPC codes

Kite codes are a class of rateless FEC codes designed for the noisy channel. In this paper, we propose a new ensemble of nonbinary rate-compatible (RC) LDPC codes, which is constructed based on Kite codes. The proposed nonbinary RC codes (nonbinary Kite codes, for simplicity) possess coding rate varying “continuously” from 0.3 to 0.9. Moreover, the degree distribution varies with the incremental redundancy. Simulation results show that the nonbinary Kite codes outperform their binary counterparts with the BPSK modulation in a wide range of coding rates over the AWGN channel. We also examine the application of nonbinary Kite codes to fountain communications. Numerical results show that the average throughput achievable with nonbinary Kite codes can be close to the capacity within a wide region of SNRs.