Spinal codes

Spinal codes are a new class of rateless codes that enable wireless networks to cope with time-varying channel conditions in a natural way, without requiring any explicit bit rate selection. The key idea in the code is the sequential application of a pseudo-random hash function to the message bits, to produce a sequence of coded symbols for transmission. This encoding ensures that two input messages that differ in even one bit lead to very different coded sequences after the point at which they differ, providing good resilience to noise and bit errors. To decode spinal codes, we develop an approximate maximum-likelihood decoder, called the bubble decoder, which runs in time polynomial in the message size and achieves the Shannon capacity over both additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and binary symmetric channel (BSC) models. The decoder trades off throughput for computation (hardware area or decoding time), allowing the decoder to scale gracefully with available hardware resources. Experimental results obtained from a software implementation of a linear-time decoder show that spinal codes achieve higher throughput than fixed-rate LDPC codes [11], rateless Raptor codes [35], and the layered rateless coding approach [8] of Strider [12], across a wide range of channel conditions and message sizes. An early hardware prototype that can decode at 10 Mbits/s in FPGA demonstrates that spinal codes are a practical construction.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2012

Author dc:creator

• Perry, Jonathan, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Hari Balakrishnan and Devavrat Shah.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/78364

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/78364