Convolutional fountain distribution over fading wireless channels

Abstract

Mobile broadband has opened the possibility of a rich variety of services to end users. Broadcast/multicast of multimedia data is one such service which can be used to deliver multimedia to multiple users economically. However, the radio channel poses serious challenges due to its time‐varying properties, resulting in each user experiencing different channel characteristics, independent of other users. Conventional methods of achieving reliability in communication, such as automatic repeat request and forward error correction do not scale well in a broadcast/multicast scenario over radio channels. Fountain codes, being rateless and information additive, overcome these problems. Although the design of fountain codes makes it possible to generate an infinite sequence of encoded symbols, the erroneous nature of radio channels mandates the need for protecting the fountain‐encoded symbols, so that the transmission is feasible. In this article, the performance of fountain codes in combination with convolutional codes, when used over radio channels, is presented. An investigation of various parameters, such as goodput, delay and buffer size requirements, pertaining to the performance of fountain codes in a multimedia broadcast/multicast environment is presented. Finally, a strategy for the use of ‘convolutional fountain’ over radio channels is also presented.