Distributed Unequal Error Protection Rateless Codes over Erasure Channels: A Two-Source Scenario

In distributed rateless coding, multiple disjoint sources need to deliver their rateless coded symbols (where a symbol may contain a single bit or thousands of bits) to a common destination via a single relay. In this paper, we propose and design novel distributed rateless codes called DU-rateless codes that can provide Unequal Error Protection (UEP) for disjoint sources with unequal data lengths on erasure channels. To design DU-rateless codes, we tune the coding parameters at each source and propose to smartly combine the encoded symbols at the relay. We analyze DU-rateless codes employing And-Or tree analysis technique and leverage our analysis to design several sets of codes for various setups employing the-state-of-the-art multi-objective genetic algorithms. We evaluate the performance of the designed codes using numerical simulations and discuss their advantages.