Superposition Spinal Codes with Unequal Error Protection Property

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a rateless superposition spinal code for binary erasure channel, which can provide unequal error protection (UEP) and unequal recovery time (URT) properties. By the superposition operation, the information of the more important bits is conveyed by more coded symbols than that of the less important bits, which leads to the UEP property. Moreover, a superposition parameter is introduced, which can be adjusted to meet different UEP requirements. Furthermore, we provide upper bound on the error probability for each priority level of the proposed code under maximum likelihood decoding. Simulation results show that the proposed code can provide UEP and URT properties, and the derived upper bound can well estimate the error probability of each priority level.