Performance Analysis of Unequal Error Protection Distributed Network Coding Based on Fountain Codes

In this paper, we propose an unequal error protection (UEP) distributed network coding (DNC) scheme based on fountain codes to provide arbitrary error protection (i.e., infinite protection levels) to all the source nodes in wireless relay networks (WRNs). We derive the upper and lower bit error rate (BER) bounds for the proposed UEP DNC scheme with maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding over Rayleigh fading channels. Numerical results show that the derived analytical bounds are tight and our proposed UEP DNC scheme based on fountain codes has a strong UEP property.