New Fountain Codes With Improved Intermediate Recovery Based on Batched Zigzag Coding

In this paper, two classes of fountain codes, called batched zigzag fountain codes and two-phase batched zigzag fountain codes, are proposed for the symbol erasure channel. At a cost of slightly lengthened code symbols, the involved message symbols in each batch of the proposed codes can be recovered by low complexity zigzag decoding algorithm. Thus, the proposed codes have low buffer occupancy during decoding process. These features are suitable for broadcasting to receivers with limited hardware resources. We also propose a method to obtain degree distributions of code symbols for the proposed codes via ripple size evolution by taking into account the released code symbols from the batches. We also show that the proposed codes outperform Luby transform codes and zigzag decodable fountain codes with respect to intermediate recovery rate and coding overhead when message length is short, symbol erasure rate is low, and available buffer size is limited.