Fountain Codes and Applications to Reliable Wireless Broadcast System

Abstract

This paper investigates fountain codes and applications to wireless broadcast. In this paper, we extend fountain codes on erasure channels to arbitrary channel types by first taking into account the symbol information and belief propagation (BP) algorithm. We propose a rateless-coding framework based on fountain codes, which allow reliable wireless broadcast communications and asynchronous data access simultaneously. Considering the flexible code rate characteristic, we find a new measurement to evaluate the performance of fountain codes in the wireless environment. Via comparing the performance of two types of fountain codes: Luby transform (LT) codes and Raptor codes within this framework, we get the conclusion that fountain codes will be sufficient to fulfill both requirements in a wireless system. We also demonstrate such a framework has advantages in efficiency, reliability, and robustness