Fountain code based AL-FEC for multicast services in MANETs

In this paper the reliability of a real-time service for multicast transmission over lossy Mobile Ad-hoc NETwork (MANET) is addressed. The proposed system combines application layer channel coding based on Luby Transform (LT) code with multicast delivery in a wireless network exploiting PUMA (Protocol for Unified Multicasting through Announcements). The main goal is to achieve a real-time service with an high quality level in a lossy environment. The rateless property, the ability of adapt the code on the fly, makes fountain codes an attractive solution for data broadcast/multicast applications in a MANET scenario characterized by dynamic channel conditions and packets losses. The proposed novel approach leads to an improvement on arrival times of packets towards destination nodes.