On the Practical Performance of Rateless Codes

We propose a new parameter for optimizing the performance of rateless codes by minimizing latency and data overhead. We call it Latency-Overhead Product (LOP). It is based on ideas used in the analysis of digital circuits. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the LOP parameter for a specific class of rateless codes called Online codes (OC). We give results from experiments in ideal channel and simulated wireless channel with losses. In the second part of our experiments we analyze the relationship between the message block size and the performance of rateless codes. With the results from these experiments we extend the results from the performance of Luby Transform (LT) codes published in (Vukobratovic and Despotovic, 2005) by adding figures for Online codes.

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