Joint Network-Channel Coding with Rateless Code in Two-Way Relay Systems

In this paper, we propose a three-stage rateless coded protocol for a half-duplex time-division two-way relay system, where two terminals send messages to each other through a relay between them. In the protocol, each terminal takes one of the first two stages respectively to encode its message using rateless code and broadcast the result until the relay acknowledges successful decoding. During the third stage, the relay combines and re-encodes both messages with a joint network-channel coding scheme based on rateless coding which provides incremental redundancy. Together with the packets received directly in previous stages, each terminal then retrieves the desired message using an iterative decoder. The degree profiles of the specific rateless codes, i.e., Raptor codes, implemented at both terminals and the relay, are jointly optimized for both the AWGN channel and the Rayleigh block fading channel through solving a set of linear programming problems. Simulation results show that, the system throughput as well as the error rate achieved by the optimized degree profiles always outperforms those achieved by the conventional degree profile optimized for Binary Erasure Channel (BEC) and the previous network coding scheme with rateless codes.