Performance evaluation of fountain codes for MIMO-OFDM system over Rician faded channel

Fountain Codes are referred to as a class of rateless codes'41 which efficaciously improves the performance of systems used for wireless data transmission. In this paper, we present a quantitative analysis of Fountain Coded Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) - Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems over Rician faded channel. Bit Error Rate (BER) performance evaluation and comparison is carried out on Fountain Coded and Convolution Coded MIMO - OFDM systems for a range of antenna configurations. Utilizing this model we investigated the performance merits of Fountain Codes in comparison to that of MIMO - OFDM and Convolution Codes. The simulated results in terms of BER shows that Fountain Coded MIMO - OFDM system has a coding gain of 3 dB as opposed to Convolution Coded MIMO - OFDM system.