Investigation of forward error correction coding schemes for a broadcast communication system

We compare the decoding performance and overhead of four coding schemes in a wireless broadcast transmission scenario. The four coding schemes are: repetition codes, which we treat as the baseline scheme; intra-packet Reed-Solomon (RS) codes; inter-packet Luby-Transform (LT) codes; and a concatenated RS and LT code. Results show that the LT code is approximately 10 times more error tolerant than the repetition codes and that the RS and LT concatenated code is approximately 100 times more error tolerant. Both of the LT schemes have the advantage of low overhead for a range of channel conditions, thus reducing the reception time and energy consumption.