Studies on the suitability of LT codes with Modified Degree Distribution (MDD) for fading channels

The objective of this paper is to study and analyze the suitability of Luby Transform (LT) codes for fading channels such as Rayleigh and Rician channels. The performance of LT codes is actually governed by a well-defined degree distribution function used in LT process. Hence, this paper presents a novel approach called Modified Degree Distribution (MDD) for improving the delay and Bit Error Rate (BER) performances of LT codes over fading channels. This work mainly discusses the significance of varying the proportion of degree-1 encoding symbols on the delay and BER performance of LT codes. Simulation results show that there is a significant improvement in the performance of MDD based LT codes over Rician channels compared to Rayleigh channels in terms of BER and encoding/decoding delay.