A Cross-Layer Perspective on Rateless Coding for Wireless Channels

Abstract—Rateless coding ensures reliability by providing everincreasing redundancy, traditionally at the packet level (i.e. the application layer) through erasure coding. This paper explores whether additional redundancy for wireless channels is most helpful at the packet level through erasure coding or at the physical layer through lower-rate channel coding. This cross-layer trade-off is explored in a traditional wireless setting where the communication of a message consisting of a fixed number of packets takes place over a Rayleigh fading channel. The examined scenarios include both a single receiver and multiple cooperating receivers allowing the results to be extended to situations where selection diversity is available in the system. For several interesting scenarios, this paper determines the optimal trade-off between the amount of packet-level erasure coding and physical-layer channel coding required to provide reliable communication over the widest range of operating SNR’...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ICC
• Authors: Thomas A. Courtade, Richard D. Wesel
• Keywords: Channel Coding, Communications, Erasure Coding, ICC 2009, Packet-level Erasure Coding