Outage probability of rateless codes in memoryless erasure channels

In this paper, we investigate the outage probability in decoding the rateless codes when a certain amount fountain encoded symbols are generated, and then transmitted through a memoryless erasure channel (MEC). We obtain a closed-form formula for the outage probability by accounting for the complete effect of the channel on the distribution of the received symbols. Moreover, a new model with high accuracy is proposed. The proposed model has a negligible complexity compared to the existing models and can be easily adapted in cross-layer optimizations due to its simple structure. Performance of the existing models, as well as the proposed one, are quantitatively compared using min-squared-error (MSE) and Pearson-correlation (PC).