Implementation of fountain codes in wireless relay networks

Fountain codes are first designed for erasure channels such as the Internet. Great advantage of these codes is having an efficient encoding and decoding algorithms that allow the recovery of the original symbols with low complexity and small overhead. Recently there has been some research to utilize the advantages of fountain codes in wireless channels. In this paper, we propose a framework for cooperative communication utilizing fountain codes in wireless environment. The proposed framework exploits the advantages of fountain codes in wireless relay networks. The system model considered in this paper consists of multiple sources, multiple relays, and single destination. We also consider a more realistic assumption in which the source-relay links are not error free. We analyze the total overhead required to achieve a target failure decoding probability at the destination.