Rateless Multilevel Coding and Applications

We propose a novel communication scheme that combines rateless transmission and multilevel coding (MLC). The scheme is able to attain a throughput that is equal to the constellation-constrained channel capacity. It is particularly useful in cases where the celebrated bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) would leave significant gaps to the channel capacity and therefore, MLC is necessary for efficient transmission. We illustrate the application of this scheme to pulse-position modulation (PPM) in free-space optical and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission in radio-frequency communication systems. Our numerical results show that, employing an off-the-shelf Raptor code, the proposed scheme achieves a throughput that exceeds the BICM capacity limit in a wide range of signal power.