The advance of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) networks has led to many emerging data-intensive applications at the network edge. To meet the soaring data rate requirements of these applications, numerous coding schemes has been developed. However, the high heterogeneity of edge users bring challenges to these methods, including adaptation to performance requirements, coping with unknown or varying channels, as well as inefficient multicasting. In this paper, we address those problems by developing aratelessdeep joint source-channel coding scheme featuring fine-grained control over rate and informativeness at the user. Towards this end, we first design a novel class of variational information bottleneck (VIB) by employing the multinomial-Gaussian (MG) distribution, to achieve rateless transmission over an erasure channel. We derived important results on the statistical properties of this latent distribution to facilitate efficient training of MG-VIB. Then, we apply this framework to multicasting, proposing MG-VIB-M to enhance adaptability and scalability. Simulations show that our proposed method is more flexible regarding rate-relevance tradeoffs, has greater robustness against channel imperfections, and reduces bandwidth requirements for task-oriented multicasting.

Rateless codes, also known as fountain codes, are very suitable for communication in unknown and complex channel environments. However, the overhead and complexity of rateless codes will increase sharply when the receiver’s buffer is limited. In this paper, we first present a transmission process for Luby Transform (LT) code with intermediate feedback. Subsequently, we propose a buffer-limited degree distribution optimization method based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL). The proposed method is applicable both with and without intermediate feedback. Furthermore, we analyze and verify the relationship between buffer capacity and the optimal feedback point under the condition of single intermediate feedback. Simulation results show that under the condition of limited buffer, the proposed method outperforms conventional schemes in terms of intermediate recovery rate, bit error rate and overhead performance.

Designing short Luby transformation (LT) codes with low overhead and good error performance is crucial and challenging for the deployment of vehicle-to-everything networks, which require high reliability, high spectral efficiency, and low latency. In this paper, we investigate the design of globally optimal transmission strategies that consider interactions between feedback for short LT codes using reinforcement learning (RL), where traditional asymptotic analysis based on random graph theory is known to be inaccurate in this context. First, in order to reduce the decoding overhead of short LT codes, we derive the gradient expression for optimizing the degree distribution of LT codes, and propose a RL-based distribution optimization (RL-DO) algorithm for designing short LT codes. Then, to improve the reliability and overhead of LT codes under limited feedback, we model the feedback optimization problem as a Markov decision process, and propose the RL-based joint feedback and distribution optimization (RL-JFDO) algorithm, which aims to design globally-optimal feedback schemes. Simulations show that our methods have lower decoding overhead, error rate, and decoding complexity compared to existing feedback fountain codes.

We investigate the application of reinforcement learning (RL) on online fountain codes, and propose two schemes to reduce the full-recovery overhead with limited feedback. First, we use RL in determining the optimal degree of coded symbols for a given number of feedback, and propose the RL-based degree determination (RL-DD), with the help of theoretical analysis of the relationship between recovery rate and buffer occupancy. Then we propose online fountain codes with no build-up phase using sectioned distribution (OFCNB-SD), where the encoder sends symbols whose degrees are sampled from different sections of an overall distribution, and the decoder is improved to utilize coded symbols that are not immediately decodable. We present theoretical analysis of OFCNB-SD, and introduce RL-based sectioned distribution (RL-SD) scheme where the sectioning of the overall distribution is optimized with RL. Simulation results show that our proposed schemes could achieve lower full-recovery overhead with limited feedback compared to existing schemes.

Recently, online fountain codes attract much attention as the online property is enhanced by introducing feedback. In this paper, we propose two improvements to Heuristic Table Lookup based on Overhead (HTLO), i.e., Integration based Overhead Calculation (IO) and Flexible Selection Strategy (FSS), and introduce our new feedback strategy IO-FSS-HTLO. In the proposed scheme, the degree of coded symbols and corresponding feedback points are selected to achieve lower overhead when the number of feedback transmissions is limited. Results show that IO-FSS-HTLO could achieve better overhead performance under limited feedback scenarios compared to HTLO.