Practical non-binary rateless codes for wireless channels

Modern wireless communication systems employ a variety of methods to help ensure reliable data transmission in challenging environments. One method uses a channel code designed such that a given transmission can be decoded by the receiver as soon as a sufficient number of symbols is received. Such a scheme is referred to as rateless coding. Rateless codes are well known for their application to erasure channels and there has recently been a growing interest in their use for physical-layer channels, such as additive white Gaussian noise and fading channels. For these kinds of channels, rateless codes are particularly useful in situations where the transmitter has little or no prior channel state information or when the channel is non-stationary. In this paper, we study the performance of a rateless coding scheme which uses a combination of direct modulation and a novel, rate compatible, non-binary LDPC code that is capable of excellent performance at many different code rates. We compare the performance and complexity of this method to other rateless schemes.