Expanding window fountain codes for unequal error protection

A novel approach to provide unequal error protection (UEP) using rateless codes over erasure channels, named Expanding Window Fountain (EWF) codes, is developed and discussed. EWF codes use a windowing technique rather than a weighted (non-uniform) selection of input symbols to achieve UEP property. The windowing approach introduces additional parameters in the UEP rateless code design, making it more general and flexible than the weighted approach. Furthermore, the windowing approach provides better performance of UEP scheme, which is confirmed both theoretically and experimentally. © 2009 IEEE

Expanding window fountain codes for scalable video multicast

Digital Fountain (DF) codes have recently been suggested as an efficient forward error correction (FEC) solution for video multicast to heterogeneous receiver classes over lossy packet networks. However, to adapt DF codes to low-delay constraints and varying importance of scalable multimedia content, unequal error protection (UEP) DF schemes are needed. Thus, in this paper, Expanding Window Fountain (EWF) codes are proposed as a FEC solution for scalable video multicast. We demonstrate that the design flexibility and UEP performancemake EWF codes ideally suited for this scenario, i.e., EWF codes offer a number of design parameters to be "tuned" at the server side to meet the different reception conditions of heterogeneous receivers. Performance analysis of H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) multicast to heterogeneous receiver classes confirms the flexibility and efficiency of the proposed EWF-based FEC solution