Performance evaluation of rateless erasure correcting codes for content distribution

Over the Internet, bit errors within the data packets translate into packet losses at the higher layers of the OSI model, yielding a packet erasure channel. Modern erasure correcting codes promise to offer a very simple and efficient solution to data transfers over these channels, opening up also other interesting applications. Amongst them one can enumerate reliable large scale content distribution, high quality real-time data transfers, distributed storage and others. These considerations make the study of such codes an actual and interesting topic. This paper presents a performance evaluation of some rateless erasure correcting codes. The performance evaluation is based on simulations, having as a secondary purpose the study of the feasibility of some proposed applications found in current literature. Several scenarios including various loss models have been simulated and the results show that these codes may indeed find applications in large-scale content distribution.