On-line construction of irregular repeat accumulate codes for packet erasure channels

In many applications erasure correcting codes are used to recover packet losses at high protocol stack layers. The objects (e.g. files) to be transmitted often have variable sizes, resulting in a variable number of packets to be encoded by the packet-level encoder. In this paper, algorithms for the (on-line) flexible design of parity-check matrices for irregular-repeat-accumulate codes are investigated. The proposed algorithms allow designing in fast manner parity-check matrices that are suitable for low-complexity maximum-likelihood decoding. The code ensembles generated by the algorithms are analyzed via extrinsic information transfer charts. Numerical results show how the designed codes can attain codeword error rates as low as 10^{-5} without appreciable losses w.r.t. the performance of idealized maximum-distance separable codes. Finally, we apply the proposed codes to the upcoming aeronautical communication standard, showing large performance improvements and proving the efficiency and the flexibility of the developed method.