Throughput of Rateless Codes over Broadcast Erasure Channels

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the throughput of rateless codes in broadcast erasure channels with multiple receivers, providing asymptotic behavior, bounds, and simulation results to improve understanding of system performance.

Contribution

It offers a detailed characterization of throughput for rateless codes over Markov modulated channels, including asymptotic analysis and tighter bounds for finite parameters.

Findings

Throughput scales with the number of receivers n.

Derived explicit asymptotic throughput expressions.

Simulation results confirm the tightness of the bounds.

Abstract

In this paper, we characterize the throughput of a broadcast network with n receivers using rateless codes with block size K. We assume that the underlying channel is a Markov modulated erasure channel that is i.i.d. across users, but can be correlated in time. We characterize the system throughput asymptotically in n. Specifically, we explicitly show how the throughput behaves for different values of the coding block size K as a function of n, as n approaches infinity. For finite values of K and n, under the more restrictive assumption of Gilbert-Elliott channels, we are able to provide a lower bound on the maximum achievable throughput. Using simulations we show the tightness of the bound with respect to system parameters n and K, and find that its performance is significantly better than the previously known lower bounds.