On-Line Fountain Codes With Unequal Error Protection

Abstract

A new encoding scheme for on-line fountain codes is proposed to provide unequal error protection (UEP) for source symbols. Both the weighted-selection strategy and the expanding-window strategy are used to achieve the UEP property. We analyze the bound of overhead to demonstrate the performance. We also make comparisons with on-line fountain codes that provide equal error protection. Simulation results show that with the proposed scheme, UEP is achieved, where the most important symbols are recovered faster than the least important symbols.