Fountain Coding via Multiplicatively Repeated Non-Binary LDPC Codes

We study fountain codes transmitted over the binary-input symmetric-output channel. For channels with small capacity, receivers in fountain coding systems needs to collects many channel outputs to recover information bits. Since a collected channel output yields a check node in the decoding Tanner graph, the channel with small capacity leads to large decoding complexity. In this paper, we introduce a novel fountain coding scheme with non-binary LDPC codes. The decoding complexity of the proposed fountain code does not depend on the channel. Numerical experiments show that the proposed codes exhibit better performance than conventional fountain codes, especially for moderate number of information bits.