PERFORMANCE REVIEW OF FOUNTAIN CODES FOR NOISY CHANNELS

Abstract

Current networks use unicast-based protocols such as the transport control protocol (TCP), which require a transmitter which continually send the same packet to the reciever until acknowledged by the receiver. It can be seen that this architecture does not goes well when more than one user access a server concurrently and is extremely inefficient when the information transmitted is always the same. An alternative approach for this where packets are not ordered and the recovery of some subset of packets will allow for successful decoding. This class of codes, called fountain codes, has greatly influenced the design of codes for binary erasure channels (BECs), a well-established model for the Internet. Luby transform codes (LT codes) are the first class of practical fountain codes that are near-optimal erasure correcting codes. The LT codes employs a particular simple algorithm based on the exclusive or operation to encode and decode the message. This paper will review Fountain Codes and its practical applications i.e LT codes and Raptor codes