Joint network channel fountain scheme for reliable communication in wireless networks

Joint network-channel coding (JNCC) has attracted significant interest recently for reliable data transmission over error-prone transmission channel. However, it appears that no fixed-rate channel coding is capable of driving the outage probability to zero without channel state information at the transmitter. In this paper we employ rateless coding and network coding for reliable communication in wireless relay networks. Specially we develop a scheme of joint network and fountain coding (JNFC), which can effectively combat the detrimental effect of wireless fading channel by seamlessly coupling fountain and network paradigms. Simulation results justify that our proposed JNFC has significant performance advantage over other schemes in a variety of metrics.