Systematic Transmission With Fountain Parity Checks for Erasure Channels With Stop Feedback
In this paper, we present new achievability bounds on the maximal achievable rate of variable-length stop-feedback (VLSF) codes operating over a binary erasure channel (BEC) at a fixed message size M = 2^k. We provide new bounds for VLSF codes with zero error, infinite decoding times and with nonzero error, finite decoding times. Both new achievability bounds are proved by constructing a new VLSF code that employs systematic transmission of the first k bits followed by random linear fountain parity bits decoded with a rank decoder. For VLSF codes with infinite decoding times, our new bound outperforms the state-of-the-art result for BEC by Devassy et al. in 2016. We also give a negative answer to the open question Devassy et al. put forward on whether the 23.4% backoff to capacity at k = 3 is fundamental. For VLSF codes with finite decoding times, numerical evaluations show that the achievable rate for VLSF codes with a moderate number of decoding times closely approaches that for VLSF codes with infinite decoding times.
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