Rateless Autoencoder Codes: Trading off Decoding Delay and Reliability
This addresses the need for flexible communication in scenarios with potential interruptions, offering a practical solution for real-time or delay-sensitive applications.
The paper tackles the problem of decoding messages before receiving the full codeword in communication systems, proposing rateless autoencoder codes that trade off decoding delay and reliability, with results showing significant outperformance over conventional designs.
Most of today's communication systems are designed to target reliable message recovery after receiving the entire encoded message (codeword). However, in many practical scenarios, the transmission process may be interrupted before receiving the complete codeword. This paper proposes a novel rateless autoencoder (AE)-based code design suitable for decoding the transmitted message before the noisy codeword is fully received. Using particular dropout strategies applied during the training process, rateless AE codes allow to trade off between decoding delay and reliability, providing a graceful improvement of the latter with each additionally received codeword symbol. The proposed rateless AEs significantly outperform the conventional AE designs for scenarios where it is desirable to trade off reliability for lower decoding delay.