Bit-Error-Rate Analysis of Raptor Codes over Rician Fading Channels

Abstract

The bit-error-rate expressions of nonsystematic Raptor (NR) codes and systematic Raptor (SR) codes over Rician fading channels are first derived using a Gaussian approximation (GA) approach. These BER expressions provide a significant reduction in computational complexity for analyzing system performance when compared with simulation and discretized density evolution (DDE). As shown by the asymptotic analysis, the NR codes originally designed for binary erasure channels still have good performance on Rician fading channels but SR codes do not. Therefore, the degree distributions of SR codes are specifically optimized on Rician channels which are superior to the existing SR codes and comparable to NR codes.