Comparison of decoding schemes for Ball-into-Bin rateless codes

Abstract

Rateless coding in wireless communication requires the receiver to continuously collect data until the decoding is finished successfully. Existing physical-layer rateless coding methods have many drawbacks like high error floor especially at low SNRs due to the dependency of check node degree distributions on the channel conditions to achieve the near capacity performance. Here a Ball-into-Bin rateless code is used to reduce high error floor at low SNRs thereby trying to achieve an equal degree for both the systematic symbols and encoded symbols. An Incremental Partial Decoding algorithm is used for decoding that tries to recover the messages from limited or insufficient number of coded symbols. Simulation results shows that the partial decoding algorithm gives better performance in terms of bit error rate and overhead.