Fountain Codes with Varying Probability Distributions

Abstract: Fountain codes are rateless erasure-correcting codes, i.e., an essentially infinite stream of encoded packets can be generated from a finite set of data packets. Several fountain codes have been proposed recently to minimize overhead, many of which involve modifications of the Luby transform (LT) code. These fountain codes, like the LT code, have the implicit assumption that the probability distribution is fixed throughout the encoding process. In this paper, we will use the theory of posets to show that this assumption is unnecessary, and by dropping it, we can achieve overhead reduction by as much as 64% lower than LT codes. We also present the fundamental theory of probability distribution designs for fountain codes with non-constant probability distributions that minimize overhead.