Fountain-inspired erasure coding for real-time traffic

An erasure correction strategy based on fountain coding is proposed for traffic with real-time requirements. A sliding window marks the range of non-expired data. Each new block entering the window is once sent as such, followed by probabilistically sending a repair packet. The repair packets are formed as a random combination of the blocks in the current window using a degree distribution as in LT coding. The performance of the method with a given channel loss probability is analyzed using a Markov chain model. The state space, however, has to be truncated for computational tractability. The truncation error is verified to be small enough by simulations. By using the analytical model the optimal degree distribution is found to be of single-degree type. The performance of the proposed scheme is compared with deterministic settings, in which repair packets are sent after fixed number of systematic packets. Further comparison is made against Raptor coding, and we note that using the presented strategy can result in better performance in some situations.