RS + LDPC-Staircase codes for the erasure channel: Standards, usage and performance

Application-Level Forward Erasure Correction (AL-FEC) codes are a key element of telecommunication systems. They are used to recover from packet losses when retransmission are not feasible and to optimize the large scale distribution of contents. In this paper we introduce Reed-Solomon/LDPC-Staircase codes, two complementary AL-FEC codes that have recently been recognized as superior to Raptor codes in the context of the 3GPP-eMBMS call for technology [1]. After a brief introduction to the codes, we explain how to design high performance codecs which is a key aspect when targeting embedded systems with limited CPU/battery capacity. Finally we present the performances of these codes in terms of erasure correction capabilities and encoding/decoding speed, taking advantage of the 3GPP-eMBMS results where they have been ranked first.