Efficient Unequal Error Protection for Online Fountain Codes

In this paper, an efficient unequal error protection (UEP) scheme for online fountain codes is proposed. In the build-up phase, the traversing-selection strategy is proposed to select the most important symbols (MIS). Then, in the completion phase, the weighted-selection strategy is applied to provide low overhead. The performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed and compared with the existing UEP online fountain scheme. Simulation results show that in terms of MIS and the least important symbols (LIS), when the bit error ratio is $10^{-4}$, the proposed scheme can achieve 85% and 31.58% overhead reduction, respectively.