Digital-fountain codes

Abstract

Digital-Fountain codes, or simply, Fountain Codes (FC), are a relatively new class of erasure codes. They build on previous erasure codes by significantly improving the encoding and decoding costs, as well as being able to cater for different channel qualities. The latter property, especially, makes them highly robust and ideal in multicast scenarios, where a few servers deal with a huge number of clients over different communication links. This Final-Year Project report details the work that has been done. Specifically, it details previous work done in the field, whilst also giving a background on the subject. The report examines the encoder and decoder created through implementing a codec in C++, and analyses the results obtained. Moreover, it shows the advantages of FC over other erasure codes, whilst also showing that Random Linear Fountain Codes lead to complete decoding of the message most of the time with just 10 redundant packets.