Design and analysis of eIRA codes on correlated fading channels

We present a simple design technique for extended irregular repeat-accumulate (eIRA) codes for flat Rayleigh fading channels, using simple channels as surrogates in the design. We show that eIRA codes designed for the burst-erasure channel (BuEC) or the burst-erasure channel with AWGN (BuEC-G) achieve essentially the same performance over Rayleigh fading channels as codes designed for the fading channel. Thus, to design good codes for Rayleigh fading channels, instead of implementing the complex design procedures targeted specifically for this channel, we propose the simple approach of designing codes over surrogate channels, the BuEC or the BuEC-G. We also derive a new channel statistic, the distribution of the number of faded bits per codeword which determines the difference between correlated and uncorrelated (ideally interleaved) fading channel performance.