A rateless coding scheme based on efficiency-fairness principles

LT codes have excellent average performance in capacity-achievability. It is difficult to ensure the LT codes always have stable excellent performance. This paper proposes an ideal model to make a more comprehensive description for rateless codes. A novel coding scheme based on efficiency-fairness principles is proposed to improve the stability which is mainly determined by the minimum variable-node degree. The coding scheme is composed of two stages. The first stage mainly considers efficiency, which aims to reduce redundant information, increase the number of recovered packets and improve the order recovery performance as much as possible. The second stage focuses on fairness, which aims to balance the variable-node degree. The simulation results show that the scheme has higher minimum variable-node degree and significant improvement in performance of code rate, order and uniformity recovery compared with existing schemes.