Feedback-based unequal error protection fountain code over device-to-device broadcast

To enhance encoding efficiency, an unequal error protection (UEP) broadcast scheme based on one additional feedback is proposed. Different from the equal probability selection for source packets in traditional fountain encoding, the proposed scheme calculates the packet loss ratio (PLR) according to the feedback results in systematic broadcast phase (SBP) and then optimizes the selection probability for source packets to guarantee higher level error protection for those source packets with larger PLRs. Thus the amount of unnecessarily redundant encoded packets during encoding broadcast phase (EBP) is decreased significantly. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme can recover 60% more packets than the traditional non-feedback broadcast scheme at the expense of tolerably only one feedback procedure.