Adaptive Capacity-Achieving Channel Coding for Fountain-Coded Multicast Transmission in Packet Radio Systems

For time-varying fading, adaptation of the physical-layer channel code greatly enhances the throughput of a multicast transmission system, even if the system employs an application-layer fountain code for packet erasure correction. Performance evaluations for adaptive channel-coding protocols typically require extensive simulations of the fading channel, the iterative decoding process, and the generation of the control information that is used for the adaptation of the channel code. We present a method for the evaluation of such protocols that avoids a substantial amount of the computation required by traditional simulations, and we demonstrate that some important performance measures can be evaluated entirely by analysis. By the use of capacity-achieving channel codes in our investigation, we also decouple the performance of the adaptive coding protocol from the performance of a particular type of channel code and decoding method, which facilitates comparisons among different protocols. The application of our methods is demonstrated for two adaptive channel-coding protocols that are candidates for fountain-coded multicast transmission in packet radio systems.