Performance assessment of fountain-coded schemes for progressive packet recovery

Fountain codes are gradually being incorporated into broadcast technologies, such as multimedia streaming for 4G mobile communications. In this paper, we investigate the capability of existing fountain-coded schemes to recover a fraction of the source data at an early stage and progressively retrieve the remaining source packets as additional coded packets arrive. To this end, we propose a practical Gaussian elimination decoder, which can recover source packets “on-the-fly”. Furthermore, we introduce a framework for the assessment of progressive packet recovery, we carry out a performance comparison of the investigated schemes and we discuss the advantages and drawbacks of each scheme.