Analysis and comparison of FEC and FEC-ARQ protection schemes based on RS and Raptor code

Four protection schemes based on RS and Raptor code as well as FEC and hybrid FEC-ARQ are analyzed and compared for erasure channels in this paper. RS code is a classic block channel code while Raptor code is a new kind of rateless code, which can produce a potentially infinite stream of packets. FEC and hybrid FEC-ARQ schemes based on RS and Raptor code are described and compared in detail. Then numeric analysis and experiments are conducted on these schemes in terms of several performance measures. The results demonstrate that Raptor code based schemes can effectively reduce coding complexity and FEC-ARQ protection mechanism can effectively increase channel utility.