Distributed rateless coding with cooperative sources

In this paper, we propose a distributed rateless coding (DRC) scheme for a two-user cooperative system. In DRC, the overall transmission is divided into two phases, a broadcast phase and a cooperation phase. In the broadcast phase, each user keeps transmitting its rateless coded symbols to the other user and the destination until its message has been successfully decoded by the destination or the other user. In the cooperation phase, each user encodes both users´ messages by using a rateless code and transmits them to the destination. A linear programming optimization problem is then formulated to find the optimal degree distribution for the proposed distributed rateless code. The performance of the proposed code is analyzed and validated by simulations.