In this paper the performance limits and design principles of rateless codes over fading channels are studied. The diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) is used to analyze the system performance for all possible transmission rates. It is revealed from the analysis that the design of such rateless codes follows the design principle of approximately universal codes for parallel multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels, in which each sub-channel is a MIMO channel. More specifically, it is shown that for a single-input single-output (SISO) channel, the previously developed permutation codes of unit length for parallel channels having rate LR can be transformed directly into rateless codes of length L having multiple rate levels (R, 2R, . . ., LR), to achieve the DMT performance limit.
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