Rateless Coding for MIMO Block Fading Channels

TL;DR

This paper investigates the performance limits and design principles of rateless codes over MIMO fading channels, revealing their connection to universal codes and demonstrating how permutation codes can be adapted for rateless coding.

Contribution

It introduces a design framework for rateless codes over MIMO channels based on the universal code principle, and shows how permutation codes can be transformed for rateless applications.

Findings

Rateless codes can achieve the DMT performance limit over MIMO channels.

Permutation codes for parallel channels can be adapted into rateless codes.

Design principles align with universal coding strategies for MIMO systems.

Abstract

In this paper the performance limits and design principles of rateless codes over fading channels are studied. The diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) is used to analyze the system performance for all possible transmission rates. It is revealed from the analysis that the design of such rateless codes follows the design principle of approximately universal codes for parallel multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels, in which each sub-channel is a MIMO channel. More specifically, it is shown that for a single-input single-output (SISO) channel, the previously developed permutation codes of unit length for parallel channels having rate LR can be transformed directly into rateless codes of length L having multiple rate levels (R, 2R, . . ., LR), to achieve the DMT performance limit.