Robust quaternary fountain codes in AWGN interference

Luby transform (LT) codes have received less attention in larger non-binary fields. Robust soliton distribution (RSD) was designed to provide universal optimality over the binary erasure channel in terms of minimising the overhead. In this study, the authors introduce a fundamental degree distribution (FDD), which when used with non-binary LT codes, outperforms their binary counterparts using the RSD in terms of error rate and realised code rate. For instance, over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel at of 12dB and a rateless criteria (zero error probability), a non-systematic 4-ary LT code using the FDD can achieve a code rate of 0.75, compared to its binary counterpart which only achieves a code rate of 0.7.