Fountain Codes with Varying Probability Distributions
Abstract
Fountain codes are rateless erasure-correcting codes, i.e., an essentially infinite stream of encoded packets can be generated from a finite set of data packets. Several fountain codes have been proposed recently to minimize overhead, many of which involve modifications of the Luby transform (LT) code. These fountain codes, like the LT code, have the implicit assumption that the probability distribution is fixed throughout the encoding process. In this paper, we will use the theory of posets to show that this assumption is unnecessary, and by dropping it, we can achieve overhead reduction by as much as 64% lower than LT codes. We also present the fundamental theory of probability distribution designs for fountain codes with non-constant probability distributions that minimize overhead.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1001.1798,
title = {Fountain Codes with Varying Probability Distributions},
author = {Kai Fong Ernest Chong and Ernest Kurniawan and Sumei Sun and Kai Yen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1001.1798},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
5 pages, 1 figure. Changes, including a different simulation example in Section IV, are made to improve clarity. Theory remains unchanged. Resubmitted to the 6th International Symposium on Turbo Codes & Iterative Information Processing (ISTC 2010).