Parallel Concatenation of Non-Binary Linear Random Fountain Codes with Maximum Distance Separable Codes

The performance and the decoding complexity of a novel coding scheme based on the concatenation of maximum distance separable (MDS) codes and linear random fountain codes are investigated. Differently from Raptor codes (which are based on a serial concatenation of a high-rate outer block code and an inner Luby-transform code), the proposed coding scheme can be seen as a parallel concatenation of a MDS code and a linear random fountain code, both operating on the same finite field. Upper and lower bounds on the decoding failure probability under maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding are developed. It is shown how, for example, the concatenation of a $(15,10)$ Reed-Solomon (RS) code and a linear random fountain code over a finite field of order $16$, $\mathbb {F}_{16}$, brings to a decoding failure probability $4$ orders of magnitude lower than the one of a linear random fountain code for the same receiver overhead in a channel with a erasure probability of $\epsilon=5\cdot10^{-2}$. It is illustrated how the performance of the novel scheme approaches that of an idealized fountain code for higher-order fields and moderate erasure probabilities. An efficient decoding algorithm is developed for the case of a (generalized) RS code.