Abstract—In the past few years, joint network-channel coding (JNCC) has drawn significant attention for reliable data communication in wireless network. However, it appears that fixed-rate channel coding is ineffective to make the outage probability to zero without having precise channel state information at the transmitter. To enhance the link robustness and the system throughput, this paper presents a joint network-fountain coding (JNFC) scheme which can effectively combat the detrimental effect of wireless fading channel by seamlessly coupling fountain and network paradigms. In particular, we consider a cooperative system with two sources, two relays and one destination where the sources encode the message using fountain code and broadcast to the destination and relays. While the relays first decode the information and then transmit to the destination after network and fountain coding. For information combining at relays we employ Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) and Modified LT coding (MLT). Simulation results justify that JNFC has significant performance advantage over other schemes and JNFC with Modified LT coding (JNFC-MLT) always outperforms JNFC with Random Linear Network Coding (JNFC-RLNC) in a variety of metrics regardless of network scenarios.

Index Terms—Cooperative communications, fountain codes, network coding

Cite: Ahasanun Nessa, Michel Kadoch, and Bo Rong, "Efficient and Reliable Communication in Wireless Relay Networks Using Joint Network Channel Fountain," Journal of Communications, vol. 9, no. 8, pp. 597-606, 2014. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.9.8.597-606