The End-to-End Performance of Rateless Codes in Poisson Bipolar and Cellular Networks

Abstract

Rateless coding is a promising forward error correction technique to meet both delay and reliability requirements of emerging wireless applications. However, existing works on rateless codes mostly considered finite networks or ignored the traffic dynamics. In this paper, we present a comprehensive investigation of the end-to-end performance for rateless codes in Poisson bipolar and cellular networks. Specifically, we propose the notion of the end-to-end success probability , which is the success probability given an end-to-end delay requirement, to jointly evaluate the delay performance and transmission reliability of rateless codes. To fully characterize the end-to-end delay, we divide it into two parts, namely the packet waiting time and the transmission time, and provide tractable yet accurate approximations to their statistical distributions. Compared with the previous works, the proposed general framework and the end-to-end performance metric help obtain insights on the role of scheduling, queueing, and coding scheme in practical radio access networks. The approximations are verified to be effective and reliable through simulations. Overall, the results show the significant benefits of rateless codes relative to the fixed-rate codes in terms of the transmission reliability with an end-to-end delay requirement.