Spatially-Coupled Precoded Rateless Codes (1302.1511v1)

Abstract: Raptor codes are rateless codes that achieve the capacity on the binary erasure channels. However the maximum degree of optimal output degree distribution is unbounded. This leads to a computational complexity problem both at encoders and decoders. Aref and Urbanke investigated the potential advantage of universal achieving-capacity property of proposed spatially-coupled (SC) low-density generator matrix (LDGM) codes. However the decoding error probability of SC-LDGM codes is bounded away from 0. In this paper, we investigate SC-LDGM codes concatenated with SC low-density parity-check codes. The proposed codes can be regarded as SC Hsu-Anastasopoulos rateless codes. We derive a lower bound of the asymptotic overhead from stability analysis for successful decoding by density evolution. The numerical calculation reveals that the lower bound is tight. We observe that with a sufficiently large number of information bits, the asymptotic overhead and the decoding error rate approach 0 with bounded maximum degree.