Performance analysis and improvement of online fountain codes

The online property of fountain codes enables the encoder to efficiently find the optimal encoding strategy that minimizes the encoding overhead based on the instantaneous decoding state. Therefore, the receiver is able to optimally recover data from losses that differ significantly from the initial expectation. In this paper, we propose a framework to analyze the relationship between overhead and the number of recovered source symbols for online fountain codes based on random graph theory. Motivated by the analysis, we propose improved online fountain codes (IOFCs) by introducing a designated selection of source symbols. Theoretical analysis shows that IOFC has lower overhead compared with the conventional online fountain codes. We verify the proposed analysis via simulation results and demonstrate the tradeoff between full recovery and intermediate performance in comparison to other online fountain codes.