Flexible On-Line Construction of IRA Codes for Packet Erasure Correction with Application to Aeronautical Communications

In many applications erasure correcting codes are used to recover packet losses at high protocol stack layers. The objects (e.g. files) to be transmitted often have variable sizes, resulting in a variable number of packet to be encoded by the packet-level encoder. In this paper, algorithms for the (on-line) flexible design of parity-check matrices for irregular-repeat-accumulate codes are investigated. The proposed algorithms allow designing in fast manner parity-check matrices that are suitable for low-complexity maximum-likelihood decoding. The code ensembles generated by the proposed algorithms are analyzed via extrinsic information transfer charts. Numerical results show how the designed codes can attain codeword error rates as low as 10^{-5} without appreciable losses w.r.t. the performance of idealized maximum-distance separable codes. The application of the proposed techniques to the upcoming aeronautical communication standard is investigated, proving the efficiency and the flexibility of the approach.

[1]  Marco Chiani,et al.  On Construction of Moderate-Length LDPC Codes over Correlated Erasure Channels , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Communications.

[2]  M. Schnell,et al.  NEWSKY Networking the Sky for Aeronautical Communications , 2007, 2007 Integrated Communications, Navigation and Surveillance Conference.

[3]  Robert G. Gallager,et al.  Low-density parity-check codes , 1962, IRE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[4]  Marco Chiani,et al.  Simple reconfigurable low-density parity-check codes , 2005, IEEE Communications Letters.

[5]  David Burshtein,et al.  Efficient maximum-likelihood decoding of LDPC codes over the binary erasure channel , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

[6]  Stephan ten Brink,et al.  Convergence behavior of iteratively decoded parallel concatenated codes , 2001, IEEE Trans. Commun..

[7]  Michael Mitzenmacher,et al.  A digital fountain approach to asynchronous reliable multicast , 2002, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[8]  Marco Chiani,et al.  Generalized IRA Erasure Correcting Codes for Hybrid Iterative/Maximum Likelihood Decoding , 2008, IEEE Communications Letters.

[9]  Marco Chiani,et al.  Pivoting Algorithms for Maximum Likelihood Decoding of LDPC Codes over Erasure Channels , 2009, GLOBECOM 2009 - 2009 IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference.

[10]  Paola Pulini,et al.  Forward Link Performance Analysis for the Future IEEE 802.16-Based Airport Data Link , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Communications.

[11]  Daniel Medina,et al.  A Crosslayer Geographic Routing Algorithm for the Airborne Internet , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Communications.

[12]  Daniel A. Spielman,et al.  Practical loss-resilient codes , 1997, STOC '97.

[13]  Michael Luby,et al.  A digital fountain approach to reliable distribution of bulk data , 1998, SIGCOMM '98.

[14]  Andrea Montanari,et al.  Life Above Threshold: From List Decoding to Area Theorem and MSE , 2004, ArXiv.

[15]  Marco Chiani,et al.  Low-Complexity LDPC Codes with Near-Optimum Performance over the BEC , 2008, 2008 4th Advanced Satellite Mobile Systems.

[16]  Rainer Storn,et al.  Differential Evolution – A Simple and Efficient Heuristic for global Optimization over Continuous Spaces , 1997, J. Glob. Optim..

[17]  Gerard Faria,et al.  DVB-H: Digital Broadcast Services to Handheld Devices , 2006, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[18]  Marco Chiani,et al.  Channel Coding for Future Space Missions: New Requirements and Trends , 2007, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[19]  H. Jin,et al.  Irregular repeat accumulate codes , 2000 .