Coding Schemes for an Erasure Relay Channel

This paper considers a simple network consisting of a source, a destination, and a relay. In this model, the source- relay and relay-destination links are lossless, while the source- destination link is subject to erasures. Four coding schemes for reliably conveying k symbols from the source to the destination are described. Three of these techniques are adapted directly from well-known point-to-point coding schemes - viz., the use of maximum-distance separable (MDS) codes and Luby Transform (LT) codes. The fourth approach is a new technique using uncoded transmission from the source in conjunction with a relay that transmits a sequence with this property: When the destination subtracts the effects of the unerased symbols from the sequence, what remains is an "LT-like" code for the erased symbols - and this property holds regardless of which symbols were erased on the source-destination link. The four approaches are compared in terms of their complexity and performance.