Designing of Fountain Codes with Short Code-Length

Fountain codes is a class of forward correcting codes (FEC) very suitable for applications like content dissemination and reliable multicasting in erasure channels. However, the code-length of the traditional fountain codes is quite large that holds back the data fountain scheme from efficiently supporting real-time services and resource restricted applications. This paper focuses on the designing of short-length fountain codes. Since the degree distribution of the input symbols plays an important role in achieving good decoding performance, a novel designing method for degree distribution is proposed. Simulation results show that by this method practicable short-length codes can be constructed, e.g., a code of length of 2000 achieving complete decoding with probability of 99.5% is demonstrated.